Interview: Extreme Ownership with Leif Babin

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You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Leif Babin, who, with Jocko Willink, wrote a great book called Extreme ownership. Subtitle How US Navy Seals Lead and Win. Leif and Jocko were two of the most senior SEALs on the ground in the most intense battles of Iraq. And in this book they bring some of the wisdom that they gained in that experience and through their SEAL training to life. And it's, it's an extraordinary book. It's one of my favorite books. I love the intense. This is, this is what it's all about, taking Extreme Ownership. If we want to lead, we talked in the prelude to this chat about it's not just leading, it's being a good follower as well and being part of something bigger than yourself, which we'll talk about in our chat. But love the book. I think you'll love it and I'm thrilled to take the, appreciate you taking the time to connect life.

Thanks for having me, Brian. It's great to be on with you. It's great to hear that the book is having an impact out there and certainly we appreciate you and what you do through Optimize. And I think that's exactly right. Always. You know, that's what we try to do with this book, is write a book that was humble in a way and I hope we've reflected that, that talked about, you know, not only SEALs but the soldiers and the Marines that we served with and, you know, what we learned from those guys and what we were all able to accomplish together. And then, and then some very, some very difficult lessons learned, where we made mistakes, where we failed, what we learned from that. And then, you know, how leaders can apply that to a number of examples throughout the business world or really to life.

Yeah. And again, I think you guys did an extraordinary job with that, and I'm excited to talk about some of my favorite ideas and great stories to go with it. Let's start at the top. Extreme ownership. What is it?

As we say, it's simple, not easy. So it's pretty simple in concept. I mean, this idea that you own everything in your world, there is no one else to blame. There's no excuses. And more importantly, not just owning everything that you're responsible for, but everything that affects your mission. And I think that is, you know, if you take that attitude, it requires checking your ego, you know, to constantly look in the mirror and think about how you can get better. You know, if the team's not doing what you need them to do, then you got to look at yourself first and think, okay, how can I communicate better to my team so they understand the mission, how we're trying to accomplish? What other resources can I give them? This goes up the chain of command as well, right? If you got people that you know are not approved your plans in a timely manner, not giving you resources, not providing you the personnel that you think you might need for new hires, whatever it may be, you got to lead up the chain, and they want you to succeed. So you have to push information, be more simple, clear, concise in how you do that. You have to prioritize. Maybe you're pushing too much stuff up and constantly complaining, and so your issues are drowned out. There's no excuse. There's only two measures that matter. There's effective and there's ineffective, Right? So you've got, you know, if your team's getting the job done, if you yourself, if you're not charging anybody else and you're just charging yourself your piece of the mission, then, you know, you gotta win. So if you're winning, you're effective. You gotta figure out a way to be even more effective. If you're not winning, you're ineffective. And you gotta take a hard look in the mirror and figure out a way to become effective so you can get better. Lead and win.

That's awesome. And one of the key variables, if not the. Is blame, right? And the kind of. When you know you're not taking extreme ownership is when you're blaming somebody else. Is that accurate?

For sure. I mean, that's one of the things that we encounter regularly. And it's interesting to me, you know, this concept of extreme ownership was written so that people can understand, like, wow, I need to get better. There are things I need to do to get better. And this was, you know, we certainly didn't write this from a pedestal, as if Jocko and I have got it all figured out. I mean, we have fallen on our face as many times, and I think if there's anything thing that we learned from some very dangerous and violent sustained urban combat, which is one of the most difficult terrains you can possibly fight in this urban city of Ramadi, Iraq, was humility. I mean, we were just, it was very easy to be humbled. You had a determined enemy, well organized, and if you didn't have your stuff together, I mean, they could overrun you and kill everyone. So it was something where they do things you hadn't predicted. And it's only a matter of time before experience humbles you to. You realize that you were outmaneuvered, you were beaten. Someone did something you hadn't expected, you hadn't planned for, you hadn't prepared for. And so we brought those very, very humbling experiences back from combat and then built and ran SEAL leadership training for a number of years, both me and the co author, Jocko Willink, who's also my business partner in our company Echelon, for all.

So you share a lot of ideas in the book, and I'm excited to explore many of my favorites. What's your favorite when you think about how to actually train extreme ownership?

Well, I think my favorite idea, I mean, really, I think the, this idea that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. Right. And that's a big piece of extreme ownership. And it's so humbling because I look back on my life on the times where I thought, you know, what if my team's not doing what they need to do? But if I, if I could just have better people, we'd be better, you know, or, you know, that team over there is doing well, you know, one of my competitors, but, but that they just got lucky and they just got a good team. And then you recognize that the fact that like, no, actually I got to be a better leader and leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. That's, that's one of the biggest lessons learned we brought back from combat is leadership is the single greatest factor in whether a team succeeds or fails. So, and by, by leadership, I don't just mean the senior guy at the top. I'm talking about every level of the organization. Leaders that step up, take ownership. So, you know, SEAL platoon commander, I was in charge of 16 guys. Jocko was in charge of our, you know, 35 or 40 SEALs and 50 support personnel. As our task unit commander. But, you know, beneath me in the chain command is the SEAL platoon commander in charge of 16. There's two squad leaders in charge of eight. There's each one of those guys has two fire team leaders in charge of four guys, all the way down to the front line trooper in charge of nobody else who just stepped up and took ownership of his little piece of the mission and led. And so that really is such a big factor that, that leadership is what is most important. So you got to recognize that if the team is not succeeding, if the team is ineffective, then it starts with you. And, you know, we gave an example in the book, you know, about the boat crew from our training. Buds are basic on our demolition training, about how we swapped out a leader from a failing boat crew. And that boat crew all of a sudden became. They went from worst in the class to best in the class with a single change of a leader. And it wasn't a unique example. I think that's what's that people, when people hear that, that this wasn't a unique example. We solved a number of times where a failing leader unit was struggling. They came in, swapped out the leadership, and that ends up being an exceptional unit with a different leader who gets people who believe it's possible to win, focuses them on the mission, gets them working together, and doesn't accept substandard performance, but drives them to achieve their full potential. And that team turns out to just dominate everybody else.

So I love it. And this is actually the next idea I wanted to talk, my. Probably my favorite idea as well. Tell us that story, because I think the story brings the point home so perfectly and so humblingly. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. But can you step back and actually tell us it was your. You were actually running the training, right. And you, you had that experience at this buds training with SEAL team 2 or 6 or what? I'm sorry, the boat crew. 2 or 6 or whatever it was.

Yeah, these were the, these were the boat crew members. So I, I had left, I had come back from, from that combat deployment, this is my second deployment to Iraq. Came back with those lessons learned from the battle of Ramadi, built and ran SEAL Leadership training. And I was an instructor at our training center. And so this is where everyone's going through our basic SEAL training, which is called Bud's basic underwater demolition seal training. And it's a tough program. It's about 27 weeks or so, and we usually have about a 70 to 80% attrition rate. So It's a great program. I mean, there's a lot of people that decide that they don't want to be there. They'd rather do, you know, they'd rather do something else. And they ring this bell three times and they leave. But what was interesting to me is I'd gone through this program as a student four years before. Now I'm back as an instructor. And so I'd go out and work Hell Week. Hell Week is the toughest part of that training. And it's about five or six weeks in generally to the first phase of training. And it's, it is five continuous 24 hour days. It's something that started back in the World War II era when they needed naval combat demolition units to swim upon beaches and blow up obstacles for, you know, like in Normandy or underwater demolition teams to do that in the Pacific at places like Iwo Jima, you know, or Saipan. And so what they did was there was a desperate move for guys, so they took about, you know, two or three weeks of training, combined it down into one week. And so we've kept this as our heritage that you have that five continuous 24 hour days. There's virtually no sleep and it's just a nonstop physical evolution. So it is, it's quite difficult, quite challenging. And as an instructor, you know, my job is the, I was an officer, so my job was to be the shift officer in charge. I've got a whole staff of instructors that are out there making sure students are doing what they need to do. And I'm just kind of there as just kind of a safety check and basically be the fall guy if something goes, goes wrong. That's, that's generally the officer's job. So, you know, outstanding instructors doing their thing. They don't need any oversight for me certainly, but it's, we're watching these boat crews and they say in buds every, you know, everything's a race. We always have a saying that if there's more than one guy running, it's a race. And we always compete with each other. You know, throughout our, everything we do in the SEAL team, it drives us to be better all the time. And the same way that, you know, you work out with somebody, you're going to work out harder, you're going to train harder, you get competitive, it pushes you and that's great. But the instructors say all the time it pays to be winter. So what that means is, you know, if you, you're broken up into these boat crews, they're about seven, generally seven Men assigned to a boat crew, they're carrying these big 200 pound rubber boats on their heads or at low carry or paddling them out through the big crashing waves in the surf zone. And everything you do, you're assigning this boat, there's one leader in charge of the boat crew. And so the instructors say it pays to be a winner. And so you'll go through this complex race and whoever comes across the finish line, they win. And their reward is to sit out the next race. You don't get to sit down. You get to sit down. You don't get to sleep in a situation like that because that's not a part of it. But just to sit down in that environment is a great thing. That's your reward. You get a little 10 minutes of rest while everyone else is back in the next race or getting hammered by some other physical evolution. The corollary to it pays to be a winner is it really sucks to be a loser. Instructors will be all over you. I mean, you just, you're getting all kinds of attention for negative performance if you're falling behind the rest of the pack. And you know, in this particular case, as I'm out there working this hell week, we're watching one boat crew, boat crew two is winning every race. I mean, they're coming in first place and these guys are already two or three days into it. I mean they're tired, they're exhausted. But you can see that the boat crew too, as they win races, they got smiles on their faces. I mean they're taking pride in being a high performance winning team that is beating everybody else. And, and they're, they're proud of that team. You can sense that about them. Meanwhile, another boat crew, boat crew six is losing every race and they're coming in 50 yards behind the pack and they're screaming and cussing at each other. I mean, you can hear that they're, you know, the blame game is going on big time. You know, about I'm doing my part, you're not doing yours. I mean, you can hear this from, from some distance away. So. And of course the instructor staff is pulling them out. So they're getting even worse attention and more physical evolutions. You know, sprints over the 20 foot high sand berm and running down in the cold water and all these extra exercises on already tired, exhausted guys and they're just kind of falling further and further behind the pack. So as we watch this, it goes on and on and on. And it's really been two days of this, you know, at this point. And one of my senior. My senior instructors said, hey, you know what? Why don't we swap these guys out and see what happens? Let's swap out the leaders. Let's take the leaders from each of these boat crews, put the good, you know, the boat Crew Leader from BO Crew 2 and Bokor 6 and the Boat Crew 6 that's losing in Boker 2 and see what happens. So I thought, wow, that's kind of interesting. You know, can that really make a difference? You know, would it? Is it possible nothing else is changing? Everything else is the same, Just the leader, one person. That's it. I was. I didn't really know how it was going to go. You know, I was kind of curious to see how that would happen. So, of course, we tell the, you know, we tell the boku leader from Boku 6. What? Hey, you know, we told. We call them over, you know, Boku 2, Boku 6 leaders. They're standing there. We say, all right, Boku 2, you're going to Boku 6, right? He's leaving his winning team that he loves, and you can just see it on his face. He's like, oh, man, are you kidding me? You know, he's leaving this team that he loves, and he's going over to work with this terrible boat crew that can't get the job done. But you can also see that he's kind of resigned to being that he's going to do the best he can in this boat crew. Now we tell boat Crew six leader, you're going to boat Crew two. So he's leaving this failing team where they're getting all this extra negative attention. Now he's going to a good boat crew. And this guy, he's just overcome with the lead. I mean, you could see it in his face. He's just thinking, oh, this is awesome. Finally justice is being done. I'm sure he was thinking, I got handed this boat crew crew of, you know, guys who just can't perform. And, you know, now that guy got lucky. Boat crew too. But now I get to go work with those guys and he can have my terrible boat crew. So we give them the next, you know, we give them the details for the next race, we send them on their way, and lo and behold, Boat Crew 6 comes across the finish line. First they go from being the worst boat crew way out, you know, getting outperformed by everyone else, and now they outperform the rest of the boats. And only because the leader that was. It only changed one Person, the leader. That was the impact that he had to the team. And so often we talk about that. You know what, it's a humbling thing to think about. It made me really think about how often have I made excuses as a Boker leader myself in buds when my Boker wouldn't do what they should have done and how I'm blaming the guys or thinking, man, if I just had better people. So many businesses that we work with now where people say that, oh, if I just had a better team, I need to hire better people. And the reality is most people, a big lesson learned from that for me is that most people want to win. They just don't know how. Leaders are really there to help be that forcing function to help people believe that one, it's possible to win, you can get better. If they don't believe that, you're never going to get there. If you don't believe that yourself, you can't get anybody else to believe that. You have to really and truly believe that it is possible to get better. Then you have to think about how you're going to do that. Of course, you got to work together as a team and it's about the mission. It's not about you. And I think once people kind of can bury their own ego and realize, like, if we succeed in this mission, everybody wins. And that's kind of our concept of COVID move that we wrote about as well. It is a team effort and it takes the entire team. And it's not about me, it's about the mission. So once people are mutually supporting one another, helping each other out to accomplish that mission, you know, that's, that's critical and performance takes off. And then finally I think you get, you know, you, you can't compromise on standards. You know, as I said previously, you've got to have. That leader has got to set the bar high and drive standards and not accept substandard performance. Something. You know, one of the things we talk about regularly is that it's, it's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate. And you know, it's funny, when I say something like that, people write it down or go that. I really like that. It's not what you preach, what you tolerate. Very simple, nothing profound about that. And yet it's meaningful to people because they realize how much they tolerate when they shouldn't. Right? It's one of those things where if you're. This applies to you yourself as an individual as well as if you're a leader leading a team or whether you're an employee as a part of a team or whatever it may be. But what are you tolerating yourself that you shouldn't. As soon as you start to compromise on standards, whether it's you as an individual, as a team, then that becomes the new standard. It's very easy to be like, well, yeah, I know I said I expected I was going to be early for all these meetings or I was going to, I was going to get up and work out at 4:30 in the morning and be part of Jocko's, you know, 4:45 club. And you know, that we talk about regularly and you know, now I'm not doing it. So that becomes a new standard, becomes easier and easier and easier to underperform and that becomes the standard rather than, you know, what you said, it's actually what the actions that are taken that's so good.

No bad teams, only bad leaders. And that story, and I love the way you shared it, is just so inspiring. And again, that leads us to us right. Of okay, how often are we blaming a bad team and it's extreme ownership is quit blaming the team, quit making excuses and look at what you're doing and how the standards have eroded in your own life and what you're tolerating and start there, then move from there. And one of the things we joked about before the we turned on the record button was I feel like I'm excited to continue to optimize in my professional world, but where I find my biggest challenges, if you will, in owning this extreme ownership idea is in my relationship. And my wife Alexander and I have a great relationship. But it's awesome for me to notice how often and how quickly it will be, oh, what about this and this and this? And I literally say out loud to her, yep, time for me to take some extreme ownership. Because it wouldn't come out of my mouth if I actually took extreme ownership for whatever it is that I perceive to be the challenge in that moment.

Well, Brad, I think that you're a step ahead of me then because often what my wife's telling me is it's time for you to take some extreme ownership. So look, I think it's, you know, again, we talk about it is simple, it's not easy, right? These concepts are very simple. They're not, they're not complex, they're not theory learned in a classroom, they're practical, but yet they are extremely difficult to implement. And the part of that is, you know, the, the big issue with that is ego. It's so easy to say, this is other people's fault. They should have done this, they should have done that. Particularly in personal relationships. It's the same thing. And I love my wife. We have an amazing relationship as well. But certainly she will remind me on regular occasions that I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. And maybe I started thinking about that a little bit. It's humbling, right? It's one of those things. I think we all need to be reminded that.

Right?

And thank God we have some good ladies in our lives that can do that for us. But it is definitely. You mentioned something earlier, right, that you talked about blame. The thing about extreme ownership is there are people that read this book that think it applies to everybody else. There are people that think, oh, man, if this person I work with had extreme ownership, or my wife had extreme ownership, or if my kid would take ownership, or if. If the boss had extreme ownership, or my other peer in this other department, extreme ownership. And the reality is it's about you. And it starts with you. And get asked that question all the time, like, well, how do I get people to take extreme ownership? How do I get people to take extreme ownership? And the answer is, you exhibit extreme ownership. If you want people to take ownership, then you take ownership. You say, you know what? We didn't get to where we needed to be. We didn't show up at this dinner on time or we were supposed to be here. That's totally my fault. I should have done a better job reminding you that where we needed to be and what time and backwards planning to make sure that we have plenty of time and account for traffic and all those things. You know, as a team, in my business, we didn't perform as good as we should be. That starts with me. And I should have done a better job of communicating the mission to you guys, why it was important for us to meet this timeline and why we needed to get to the standards where we were giving you better resource and training. You know, been more open about taking your criticisms and talking about how we can make this better. And if you take ownership in your life of everything like that, people around you are going to do the same thing. It is so much of a better outcome. And the reason is because if you're doing the opposite, if you're casting blame, whether you're talking about, we were running late and I'm going to blame it on my wife or we were my kids not behaving the way he should, and I'm going to blame it all on him rather than Me take a look at his parent and think, well, did I, did I feed him when he's hungry? Did I give him, make sure he took a nap when he was tired? Did I, did I do the things that I needed to do? And you know, it's the same thing, you know, in the business world and in life in general. Sports, whatever you want, you want to apply it to. But if you're casting blame, other people are going to cast blame and then it just becomes this giant big blame game that goes on. And worst of all, no one ever alters the behavior so that you never actually change the outcome. It just continues the cycle of blame or excuse making. In some cases, people are just in denial that a problem even exists when it very clearly does exist. So, you know, that to me is really the most powerful thing about extreme ownership is this idea that if I take ownership of it, then I can change the. It's not just about, hey, my bad, I screwed up. Like, you know what? That was my fault. We're going to learn the lessons from this and make sure that this never happens again, that we can overcome this challenge next time, that we disseminate these lessons learned to other people who can, who can benefit from them, and that we're going to get better all the time.

Super inspiring. Even when you describe that just in a hypothetical, hey, in this situation, if I do this versus this, I feel myself in this context drawn toward that of, yeah, if someone said that to me and we were doing this, it would make me then do an inventory of, well, how did I fall short too? Rather than looking at how the leader did this or this person did that, and there's just that upward spiral of effectiveness rather than that downward spiral of blame and avoidance of responsibility, et cetera.

I think that's exactly right, Brian. And this is what, it's fascinating to me. I actually was just having a conversation with a senior executive from an extraordinary company, doing some amazing things, but love working with these guys, you know, and we were just talking about this, how this is. He's like, I need these people to take ownership, you know, And I'm like, then you got to take ownership, right? Because if it's just human nature that if I come at you with this idea that like, I need you to do what I'm telling you to do, right? I can't really approach problems like that because you're going to get defensive, you're going to push back, you have, you know, you're a human being with your, your own ideas and your own Ego, free will, all these different things. And the goal should be for me, like, how can I get you to do what I need you to do so that we can all accomplish our mission to win? And so if I come, you know, if I approach a problem as like, brian, you did this, you screwed up. You're immediately going to get defensive and immediately either push back to me. No, well, you didn't tell me what to do. You know, I push back, blame me, blame other people. Maybe you make excuses about because you don't want to be the guy that, you know, take the fall for everybody else and it's not my fault, blah, blah, blah. And again, no behavior ever changes. But if I come in and say, brian, listen, we didn't do what we need to do as a team there, that's my fault. I'm in charge of this thing and I need you to help me understand how I can better communicate the mission to you, understand the resource that you need in the training or personnel that you might need to get this job done. Let's talk about that. What's your reaction to that? Right? It's instead of blame, instead of pushback, it's going to be actually, Leif, no, you know what? I knew I wasn't clear about the mission and I should have asked you about it. So you get this culture of extreme ownership that's built in. And let me tell you something, you try that personal relationships, it is incredibly powerful. It is incredibly powerful and you will win. It's pretty amazing. It's pretty amazing where you're like, it's your fault we didn't do it. We weren't there. That never goes well.

We can both. I can speak. I might have done that once or twice.

Even if you're right, I mean, I've had. Someone told me a long time ago when I got married, you can be right or you can be happy. And I think it doesn't matter. Even if it clearly was the other person's fault, if you take ownership of that, it's going to help to solve problems, it's going to keep you from getting defensive, and the outcome is always better, no doubt.

And it's again, effective or ineffective. Do you want to be right or do you want to be effective, loving, etc. Again, so much we can chat about.

You mentioned believing.

So one of the things that I loved in the book was the fact that you've got to be a true believer if you want to be a leader. Take extreme ownership. You've got to believe in the mission. Can you talk to us about the importance of that?

For sure. I mean, look, if you don't believe, nobody's going to believe. And we used to joke, you know, we quote a lot of movies in the SEAL teams, and one of our favorites was, you know, kind of going back to our, you know, middle school years, high school years, was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. You remember that? Where, like, he's on there. They're like, they're the thuggies, and they're getting Indiana Jones to get it, get in, you know, to become them. And he drinks the evil blood and becomes the, like, zombie guy that now. And so there's the part where like, of the evil thuggy leader is saying, you will, Dr. Jones. You will become a true believer. So we always kind of joked about that. You got to be a true believer. If you're not a true believer in the mission, you're never going to accomplish the mission. And it's as a leader, you got to believe. There's no way that you can stand. You can't fake it. You just can't fake it. You can't stand up in front of a group of people and say, hey, I feel. I mean, in any. I feel, you know, we're gonna go do this. It's gonna happen. If people can truly sense that you don't believe that it's not gonna work, you know, and I can, I can. I know a number of examples where, I mean, breaking my leg on a half pipe skateboard when I was a kid and my dad came in after they took the X ray in the hospital and said, son, everything's gonna be okay. I knew right away. I was like, my leg's broken. Got it. Okay. I mean, it's. It just, you know, you know, like, he's. He's telling you something, but he didn't. He doesn't believe it. It's going to be, you know, look, everything was okay. It was fine. But you can. You can sense that when people don't truly mean it. And so you got to truly believe. And so, you know, when you're. Anything that you dedicate yourself to, I think, you know, whether you're in a leadership position in a team, whether you're a follower, whether you're talking about pursuing, you know, sports endeavors or as a family, you know, different, you know, different paths that you could walk, I think you have to. You have to really take a step back and think real hard. Okay, why are we doing this? Let me understand. Let me, you know, if you don't Believe in something or you don't understand why something's happening, you gotta, you gotta research, you gotta ask questions, you gotta think hard about it. And you know, one of the big, the big example we used in the book was working with Iraqi soldiers. For us, that was incredibly, incredibly difficult. And it's hard, I think, for most people to understand that. But when you're taking an incredibly talented high speed unit like the SEAL teams that have an immense amount of training and have gone through this incredible screening process that I described earlier and, and, and have worked together as a team for almost a year before you even deploy together, you know, to a combat zone. We know we got each other's backs. You know, you're going, we're going into a place like Ramadi that was just at the time the most dangerous place in the world in 2006 where US soldiers and marines are getting killed almost every single day. And it was, but you know, your buddy's got your back, you can rely on them. And all of a sudden you get there and they're like, hey, guess what? You're going to do every operation with Iraqi soldiers. These guys, they have virtually no training. Someone has thrown them a uniform and an AK47 and they don't speak the same language as you. You have to talk to an interpreter. And their capability, I mean just physically is know your average SEAL can crank out hundreds of push ups and dozens and dozens of, you know, pull ups and run for miles or swim for miles. And these guys can, you know, probably can't do one, one push up. You know, I mean, they're struggling and they're just an incredibly low bar. They're just not a military fighting unit. And it's all of a sudden we got to go out with these guys. And worse, they might shoot us in the back. You know, if some of them, there's probably at least a couple guys that are in the unit that would be happy to shoot you in the back because they actually hate you. And they're really bad guys. They just happen to be serving in the Iraqi army. So that was a tall order. And guys thought, hell no, we're not doing that. You're going to, why would we do this? And the reality is we kind of had to take a step back. Jocko was, as the leader, kind of had to think about that pretty hard and say, why are they asking us to do that? This. If they're telling us we got to go out and work with these Iraqis on the most dangerous battlefield here in Iraq, why do they want us all to get killed? Of course not. Do they want us to not go and be able to kill bad guys and accomplish our mission? Of course not. So why are they asking us to do it? And it's pretty clear that if the Iraqis can't be their own security force and maintain the security of their nation, then who's going to do it? We have to. The generation upon generation upon generation of US Troops has to do that. So we had to understand why that was important to teach these guys how to fight. And plus, they were our ticket outside the wire. I mean, we couldn't get operations approved if we didn't take Iraqis with us. So right away, if we wanted to have impact on the battlefield, we had to take them along with us. And we just had to figure out a way to make that work. And we did it. We did it every time. But it was a hard sell to my team when you're saying, hey, guys, we're going to take Iraqi soldiers with us. This is what we're going to do. And we had to believe so that we could help them believe, our teammates believe. And then once our team believed and we actually found the Iraqis brought some stuff to the table that we hadn't perceived. I mean, they could figure out ways to open gates or doors that we didn't really know that weren't familiar with where our guys would smash it down, the sledgehammer and explosive charge. But yeah, they could very quietly slip into a place. They could pick out who the bad guys were, were from their dialect or their dress, when I certainly couldn't do that. You know, who's who here, you know, who's local and who's from Syria or who's from, you know, who's. Who's a jihadi that came in from Saudi Arabia, I mean, or someplace like that. So they could do that, and they brought that to the table and they enable us to go out and make a huge difference in the battlefield. So it's just one of those things where if you don't believe in something, you got to ask the questions so that you can understand why you're doing it. And you have to believe in it so you can get others to believe in it. And if you believe, then you're going to be able to persevere through the challenges that are inevitably required in order to succeed. And if you don't believe, you won't. You won't. You will not persevere at all.

Unbelievably inspiring. Talk to us about prioritizing and executing. One of the things that you make such a strong point on in the book is the fact that it's easy to get overwhelmed, you know, and in the fog of war, as you described, it's easy. Well, things will go wrong, period. Right. And at that point, complexity doesn't help. It's all about simplicity, prioritizing and executing. Can you talk to us about that?

For sure. Prioritize and execute is a critical concept on the battlefield, and it applies anywhere, certainly to business, certainly to life. I think what's hard for people to recognize and probably the biggest lesson for me is I grew up wanting to be a combat leader. I mean, I played in the sandbox with my plastic army men and my GI Joe figures. I wanted to be a combat leader. I watched every war movie I could. I started, you know, when I was probably 10 or 12. I started learning about the SEAL teams, and that really drew me to, like, I want to be a part of this unit. This is an amazing unit with an incredible legacy in history. This is what I want to do. But I think what could. What I was not fully prepared for was the violence and chaos of actual combat. It is crazy. And you got to be really comfortable in the most chaotic, difficult situation imaginable. And just to put that in perspective, you know, people ask, like, what's the M.O. you know, what's. What movie is like the. You know, the. What's the most accurate thing to real combat? And there's some great movies out there, there, but even you take a movie that's like. Like. Like Saving Private Ryan, and look, I. I didn't hit the beaches in Normandy. I can only imagine what that's like. But, you know, when you got some combat situations where they depict some chaotic, loud noises, overwhelming, you know, issues, guys that are seriously wounded and injured and how difficult that is, but even just the. The violence of that can't be replicated. And, you know, just to put this in perspective, if you're taking machine gun fire and effective rounds are coming near your head, I mean, you're talking about. Each one of them is. Got a crack that's so loud. I mean, your ears are ringing, you know, just from this. Even if it doesn't hit anything, we're talking something that's just subsonic boom. So if those rounds are hitting a, you know, concrete wall next to your head, think about the biggest, strongest guy you can. You can imagine just smashing that wall with a sledgehammer as hard as you can. And that is each, you know, each one of Those incoming rounds has that kind of kinetic energy. Multiply that 7 or 800 rounds a minute for a single belt fed machine gun. Maybe there's two or three of them shooting you at the same time. Maybe there's some RPG rockets hitting the wall and exploding with this tremendous concussion that just rings your bell and your ears are splitting and you know, throwing frag. And then on top of that, if you throw in a guy who's wounded or hit, you know, who's your brother that you care about, that you have a deep emotional connection to and bond with, is in pain and suffering and you want to help him. I mean, it is, it can be totally overwhelming. And the hardest part for it though is in those kind of situations where let's say we were on a patrol out in the middle of the street in downtown Ramadi with Iraqi soldiers and we're in the middle of a big gunfight, you don't, it's unlike the movies, right? You don't have someone who creeped into, you know, the directors trying to set up suspense so they show the bad guys creeping into position. You see like the friendly patrol moving down the street and it's like, oh, don't go. And suspense is building up. When you're in the middle of that, you don't have any of that perspective. It's literally bullets are flying around, shards of concrete or explosions are going on. It's totally overwhelming. So, and, and most of the time I literally could, I had no idea where we were getting shot at from. I might have a general direction that was maybe like 90 degrees. So there's, I don't know exactly who's shooting at us. I don't know if there's two of them. I don't know if there's a hundred of them. I don't know. You know, are they in that building over there that's 50 yards away? Are they 500 yards away down the street? I have no idea. So, you know, these things are incredibly challenging and difficult. And it's. As a leader, in order to perform in that environment, you have to be able to prioritize and execute. And you know, when they're. There's 10 different things going on at a time. How do you handle those 10 problems? No. 1. I don't care if you're Patton, I don't care if you're Napoleon Bonaparte. You cannot handle, you know, some of the greatest battlefield leaders of history. You cannot handle a dozen problems at the same time. Maybe you can handle two, maybe you can handle three, max. If you're incredibly good. What you have to do is take a step back with the highest priority, is get the team executing to accomplish that highest priority task and then move on to the next priority. That's what prioritize and execute about. And under those high pressure, difficult situations, we say to our guys, relax, look around, make a call, relax as literally, take a breath, calm yourself down when you're feeling overwhelmed. Two, look around, get some perspective. Pull yourself back from the immediate emotional reaction from a situation. You know, what's going on, where are the enemy? Maybe it's friendly shooting at us who thought we were bad guys and we don't want to shoot back at them. So you got to be able to take a look around you to make a strategic assessment about what's important and then make the call is get the team executing in order to accomplish that highest priority task, and then you move on to the next priority and the next priority. And so that's something that applies not just to combat, but to anywhere in life, in business, in so many different environments where high pressure situations, you know, where you get, you have to make a call now and there's a lot at stake and there's a number of situations where, you know, it could, it could be the case and maybe even if lives aren't on the line, you know, maybe you're not a doctor that's working in an ER with lives on the line, or someone doing some danger, you know, super dangerous construction, you know, project where they regularly take, you know, casualties or fatalities or whatever it is, but you might just be making a decision about where to invest your money or should you evacuate from the path of the hurricane that's tracking toward your beachfront. Whatever it is about that, your healthcare decisions, those kind of things where you have to pull yourself back from the immediate emotional reaction. Relax, look around, make a call. What's the highest priority? Okay, give me a strategic perspective on that and then execute to accomplish that highest priority task. Task. And, and that's what it's really all about. There's, there's two things in addition to that. You can't get target fixated because life, like, like a gunfight, life is going to change there. This is my priority I'm working on this year. All of a sudden I've got to be able to rapidly shift to a different priority when the battlefield changes, when life throws a curveball my way, when, you know, if I'm in a business and my competitors doing something different, or now all of a sudden my higher priority issues come up, up. I've got to be able to rapidly shift fire and the other piece of that. So not only do you have to have to think about that from that perspective, the other piece of that is you've got to be able to detach. You got to be able to take a step back and not be involved in the situations. And one way you can do that too is if you've thought through what life and contingencies might happen before you even get in that really high pressure situation, then it's very easy to prioritize and execute before you're like, I know exactly what to do because I already thought about this before the pressure's on, before my heart's pounding, before people are really looking at me to make a call or I already thought about that. And so it's easy for me to make that decision. If I brief my team and they know what we're going to do in the event that this likely tendency happens, then I don't even need to tell them what to do. We can already execute. And that's how the highest performing teams are able to, able, I think, to perform in some of the most difficult environments by, by that principle.

Which brings us perfectly to the next idea or my next favorite, which is one of the key ideas in the book, which is discipline leads to freedom. Right? That idea of discipline equals freedom. Yeah. So talk to us about that. And, and if you think it makes sense, Jocko's Three Alarm Clocks.

Well, that's Jocko's mantra is discipline equals freedom. And that is something that he taught me. You know, we would go out to the Southern California deserts and we train hard and you're up till 2 o' clock in the morning and then you got to be up at seven to come in for the first brief and start going for the day again. So there's not a lot of time to sleep and have any personal time yourself. And oftentimes guys will complain that there's not enough time. We need to build some time to schedule the workout and we got to do this. And Jocko would just say, listen, you got to make time for the things that are important. Important. Discipline equals freedom. You want to have the freedom to be able to maintain a high level of physical fitness. You got to have the discipline to get up early. So yeah, you went to bed at 2 o' clock in the morning. Cool. Wake up at 4:30 and get your workout on. Wake up at 5 to get your workout on. And most guys don't have the discipline to do that. I Mean, that's just, it's a hard thing for people to do, I think once you recognize that they seem to be such an opposite thing we call the dichotomy of leadership. These things that seem to be on opposite sides of the spectrum. And yet freedom, what everybody wants. The ability to do whatever you want to and have no strings attached and you can do whatever you want. And discipline, which kind of invokes this idea of this kind of rigid mindset that you have to be doing things a certain way. And it seems to be opposite of freedom. And yet the pathway to freedom is this. And that's one thing I learned from Jocko and I think it's incredibly important and powerful. You know, he learned from his, his predecessors in the SEAL teams that, you know, you added three alarm clocks back then. It was a one that plugged in the wall, one that was battery powered and one that was wind up. I don't know if you can even get a wind up clock these days. But, but just that there, you know, there's no excuse, there's no excuse for not, not getting out of, not getting out of bed and getting it done. And let me tell you something, I've got, you know, I participate in the 445 Club every chance I can to get up early and work out. When I don't do that, when I do get lax on those times or had a rough night or I've got young kids that stayed up all night or kept me up for whatever reason, you always regret that, right? You think, oh, I can just work out. When I get up later or after my first meeting or phone call, things come up, doesn't happen and you end up up slipping and you end up not training for a day or two and next thing you know, you don't have the freedom to perform at the highest level possible because you haven't had the discipline to maintain that. And so it's one of those things that applies anywhere. You want financial freedom, you got to have financial discipline. You want more, you know, you want more free time, you got to have a disciplined time management system. All those things across the spectrum. It's just absolutely critical and important and I think it's a mantra to live by. Discipline equals freedom.

Discipline equals freedom. Extreme ownership. 101, right?

Absolutely.

This is good, Leif. I appreciate you and all your time and this great book and your service and all of your fellow servicemen and women out there, just unbelievably inspiring and drilling brings me up to that high level from the Freedom that we enjoy. I don't take it for granted. So thank you as a. A personal thank you on behalf of everyone you served with.

Well, thank you very much, Brian. It's great to be on here with you today. I really appreciate what you do and I think this optimizes outstanding and I think it's definitely you're contributing to helping people get better in all that they do, no matter what they do and in all walks of life. And that's really what this is about for us. It's not about. It's something that I feel very passionate about because I seen the difference that these principles, this mindset of extreme ownership, the difference it can make on the battlefield. I've seen the difference it's made in the business world through dozens and dozens of companies and different industries we work with. And I've seen the difference it's made in people's lives when people tell me that I'm a better parent, I'm a better spouse because of this idea. I was casting blame and making excuses. And now things are so much better because I'm taking ownership.

No question about it. Extreme ownership. It's an extraordinary book. Book. The same energy that Leif shared with us today is throughout the book and just so much wisdom, so much grit and an inspiration. So check it out. Leif, I know that you've got a lot going on. Give us your website then. We also talked about an event you have coming up for leaders in October. Can you tell us about that?

Absolutely. Our website is echelonfront.com that's E C H E L O N F R-O-N T.com. that's our company. It's named in the opposite of the rear echelon. So that's something the military that, you know, the guys in the back or the rear echelon that didn't understand really what was going on forward. So we wanted to name something that was the opposite of that. So Jocko and I have this company, Echelon Front, which we were proud to be a part of. And we are putting on our first ever extreme ownership muster, which is a leadership conference geared toward anyone that wants to better themselves in any way. Whether you're a leader, whether you're aspiring leader, whether you're a follower, whether you just want to be a better spouse, better parent, it doesn't matter. Whatever walk of life that you're in, if you're looking to talk about the principles of extreme ownership, understand how to take and apply those to your life to get better that's what this is. Extreme Ownership Muster. It's going to be in San Diego October 20th and 21st. And check out our website, our registration page. We're super excited about this. I think it's going to be a great event. We are going to be out in front of the curtain. This is for us to really dive deep and engage with people and make it super interactive and talk about particular challenges that they're wrestling with and how to take this stuff and apply it directly to solve those challenges so they can lead and win.

Right on. Echelonfront.com and extreme ownership. Leif, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me Brian. Look forward to being back on with you again another time.

Right on. Look forward as well.

Take care.

Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule.

Of course it's too late to go.

Back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient Wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.