PNTV: Make Your Bed by Admiral William H. McRaven (#406)

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

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, make youe Bed by Admiral William H. McRaven. Subtitle Little Things that can change your life and maybe the world make your bed. This little great book is based on a commencement address that Admiral William H. McRaven gave to the University of Texas at Austin, right down the street from where we are these days, about 30 minutes away. The commencement address was put on YouTube. It went viral. Tons of people watched it. And then this book is basically the extension of the 10 ideas that he shared to the graduating class of UT Austin, I think in 2014 on what he learned going through his Navy SEAL training. And he unpacks those basic ideas. We'll link to the YouTube video below. In this great book shares some stories, some wisdom. Great storyteller.

It's a crazy number of Amazon reviews.

50005 star reviews. I add my 5 star review to the mix. It's a fantastic gift as well, particularly for young adults or anyone who wants a really approachable, wise collection of wisdom that's super practical and told within the context of Truly an American hero. So Admiral McRaven served for 37 years. He retired as the head of all US special special forces operations. He led the pursuit and capture of Osama Bin Laden and a ton of other stuff. Truly an American hero. This book captures some of his ideas and actually the next episode we're going to share another one of his books, his autobiography called Sea Stories, which is also fantastic. So as always, philosopher's note six page PDF, 20 minute MP3. We've got 600 of them. Check it out. Optimize me free two week trial, etc. For now, make your bed. That's lesson number one. What he told the graduating class. Hey, make your bed. Start your day with a win. Start your day with a completion. And he tells the story in the book about how when he was a young ensign in the Navy, had to make the bed perfectly. Corners needed to be tucked in, the blanket needed to be nice and tight, the pillow needed to be at a perfect 90 degree angle. The instructor had to be able to snap a coin off of it. It was so perfectly made right? Why? Because discipline matters. Doing the little things matters. And as McRaven tells us, if you can't do those small things, well, good luck doing the big things. And we talk about this all the time as well. My coach, Phil Stutz, my Yoda Tonight talks a lot about microtransactions. This moment is all we have. Give your best to this moment. Moment to moment to moment. That's where we get ultimate power. Then when the, quote, big things come, we're ready because we've disciplined ourselves to show up again starting our days. Did you make your bed this morning? You want to start the day with a win, Little bit of self discipline. Boom. That's what's most important as we get out of bed, et cetera. David Allen, getting things Done, one of the world's leading productivity experts, he says the same thing. When I interviewed him, he said, look, the sublime, everyone wants to go straight for the sublime, but they forget that it's through the mundane that we achieve. We reach the sublime. It's through the little things that we're able to connect to the best within ourselves. So make your bed. And we're going to talk about rising to the occasion and working your protocol. You want to have a protocol. You want to have a set of things that you just do on a daily basis. And that protocol can help you get through the hard, hard times when everything else is kind of blown up. You want to have certain structures in your life through which you can focus your energy and show up and do your best. And making your bed is the first lesson here, the first lesson to embody a la Admiral McRaven's wisdom from his Navy SEAL training. The second idea here is life's not fair. So there are 10 ideas in the commencement address and in the book, one of them is Life's not fair. And in this one, McRaven talks about sugar cookies. So I'm a huge fan of Navy SEAL wisdom. We've got a growing collection of books by some of the wisest, most intense, awesome Navy SEALs out there from Mark Devine, the former commander who's a dear friend, an actually investor in Optimize. We have several notes on his books, an upcoming PNTV on his latest book, and actually talks about Admiral McRaven in his newest book, Staring down the Wolf. We've got Jocko Willink. Discipline equals freedom. We got an episode on that coming up soon. Extreme ownership with Leif Babin. Fantastic book. We've got Alden Mills. Be unstoppable and unstoppable teams. David Goggins, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So check all those out. But I just love the wisdom that comes through the rigor of SEAL training. And one of the things when you're going through Navy SEAL training that you should expect is what they call a sugar cookie. If you don't know what a sugar cookie is, basically imagine you're in your full gear. You got your boots, you got your, you know, full gear, pants, et cetera, et cetera. T shirt. You run out into the surf, you jump into the ocean head first, get all soaking wet, then you come back out of the water, and you roll around in the sand until you are completely covered in every little crevice with sand. That's called a sugar cookie. Now, the sugar cookie is usually given to those who need a little bit of coaching on things like making their bread properly or doing whatever else they were asked to do and at a high level. So McRaven's going through training, and he's striving to do his best moment to moment to moment, right? And then one of his trainers comes up and says, mcraven, give me a sugar cookie. And he doesn't know what's going on, right? He's like, okay, not sure what I did, but I guess it is. This is. This is what I got to do. Heads out to the surf, jumps in, does the sand thing. Sugar cookie. And then his trainer tells him, the guy who's going through or kind of, you know, whatever bringing him through the training says, hey, calmly yet questioningly. I think he calls him Mack. Mack, do you know why you got a sugar cookie? And Ensign McRaven way before he's an admiral, right? He's just a young man going through this training. He says, no, sir. Thinking to himself, I have no idea why you just made me do that. And this guy whose name was Moki, Moki Martin, says, well, you know what? Sometimes life's not fair. You didn't do anything wrong. But sometimes life's not fair, and you got to get used to that. And you got to get used to just wearing a sugar cookie even after you do everything perfectly. And as we say in the note, you know, you can do all of your fundamentals. You can make your bed in the morning, you can meditate, you can exercise, you can show up powerfully in your energy, your work, and your love, and you can still fail. That's going to. Actually, you will still fail many, many times. Life's not fair. The wisdom and the idea here is drive on, press on. Even in the face of that unfairness. Don't complain, don't criticize anything. Get clear on what your next target is, and go crush it. And as it turns out, Moki Martin, years later, he was like the quintessential Navy seal, just Jacked triathlete back in the day. It was just super fit. And he got in an accident riding his bike one day, paralyzed in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. And McRaven says he never complained. Sugar cookie, life's not fair. Now what? Okay, I'm in a wheelchair. What am I going to do? And he proceeded to create all these races and to serve profoundly within those constraints of his reality as a true hero. And we need to decide, are we going to show up as victims, complaining about all the things going wrong in our society today? It's even easier to do it. It's always easy. With COVID and all the social justice issues, etcetera, it's easy to complain. Life isn't fair. Different things are happening in the world. The question is, how are we going to show up? Are we going to show up heroically and give the world all we've got? Which actually leads us perfectly to the next idea, which is rise to the occasion. I'm going to share directly from Admiral McRaven here. First we'll go back to making your bed. He says making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you will never do the big things right. Then we've got at some point. So this is from a chapter called rising to the occasion and being your best in the darkest moments. He says at some point, we will all confront a dark moment in life, if not the passing of a loved one, then something else that crushes your spirit and leaves you wondering about your future. In that dark moment, reach deep inside yourself and be your very best. Be your very best again. Optimize comes from the Latin optimus, which means the best. Everything we're doing here is to try to help you more and more consistently be the best version of yourself. And we need you to be the best version of yourself when you're in your darkest moments in particular. And there's something powerful about being the type of person such that the worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol. So I promised we'd come back to the protocol. A good protocol, by the way. Start with making your bed. You start by demonstrating a level of self mastery, wisdom, self mastery, courage, love. Our cardinal virtues. We want to operationalize that moment to moment to moment. And my coach, again, Phil Stutz, taught me this years ago, almost in one of our very first sessions three years ago. Wow. Almost four years ago now. He said, look, it's important to have emotional stamina. And he was complimenting me on the emotional stamina that I had, and I was demonstrating. And he said that at the end of one chat, the next chat, the start of it, I said, hey, what did you mean by emotional stamina? And he said, well, look, if you want emotional stamina, what I now call antifragile confidence, you need to have a certain protocol which is the worst that you feel. An algorithm you run. If I feel terrible, then I am that much more committed to my protocol. Now, that presupposes you have a protocol. And again, making your bet is a good one to start with. So is shutting off your electronics early the night before, eating a certain way, moving your body a certain way, then sleeping well, focusing your attention, celebrating life, being grateful, all the practices we talk about. You want to know who you are and what you do when you're at your best, and then when you're at your worst and you're not feeling great, you want to run those protocol algorithms with an even more intense ferocity. And when you do that, you literally cultivate a level of antifragility where the more you get knocked around, the stronger you get, because the more committed you are to your protocol. It's a really, really powerful concept, this idea of rising to the occasion. The worse you feel, the better you show up. The more crazy the world is, the more chaotic the world is, the more committed you are to your basic fundamentals. And again, Covid exposes a lot of things. And a friend of mine met on the trail before we moved from Ojai coming out here, and he said, did you see the Eckhart Tolle video? Right. When Covid came out, I said, I don't watch videos. I read books. What did he say? He said, well, he talked about the parable of Jesus and Jesus's parable of the wise and foolish builders. Oh, I said, exactly right. That's what's happening right now. As the world gets rocked, we see in our own lives. Did we build our lives on a foundation of rock? Right. Jesus says, you build it on rock, which is you follow my teachings, Jesus said, and actually do the things we talk about here. Then when the storms come, your foundation is on solid rock. But if you listen to these ideas, you don't do anything about it. You're like the foolish builder who builds his house on sand. Then when the storms come, sorry, your house is going to get washed away. So right now, Covid is just exposing us and demonstrating to us whether or not we have the fundamentals, the foundation, moving from theory to Practice to mastery in place or not. Because there's a lot of people that are using this as an opportunity to get stronger. One of my dear friends and heroes, Joe decenna Covid, comes. He's got to cancel all of his US Events completely. Throws his business backwards, right? What does he do? He trains three times a day. He gets even deeper into his practices. He gets in the best shape of his life because he knows he needs to rise and be the best version of himself when the world and his team needs him the most. That's what being a hero is all about. Having the strength for two, being a protector and having the discipline to work your protocol. Again, that presupposes you have one. So you got to identify what you do when you're on and then discipline yourself to consistently do it. Rise to the occasion. Which leads us to hope. McRaven tells us that hope is the most powerful force the universe. And he references Nelson Mandela and all these other exemplary heroes who were faced with extraordinary challenges, but then gave us hope and showed us that we, too, can achieve great things. We, too, can move through these challenges. And he says, that's, again, the greatest force in the universe. He shares this wisdom in the context of his Navy SEAL training. And they're going through everything, right? So all the different ways that their trainers can punish them and torture them and try to weed out the ones that aren't all in, he would. He had to go through this one training where they went down from Coronado into Mexico, I believe, and they had to go into mud, right? And they were neck deep in mud. They're supposed to stay there overnight, freezing cold, neck deep in mud. And they'd. Trainer is just taunting them, all right, you guys can get out when three of you quit or five of you quit or whatever the number was, right? And one guy starts leaving, and someone tries to pull him back, right? And he slips out of his hands, and he's trying to get out and quit. And then one guy in the back starts singing. They're neck deep in mud. And this one aspiring Navy SEAL starts singing loud and raucously and just, yeah, get bringing on. Let's go. And then another person starts singing, and another person starts singing, and he says, when you're neck deep in mud, start singing. Give others hope. Because if one guy could do that in the midst of that challenge and other guys can, that guy that was going to leave, he came back and he stuck it out through the night. Because one person had the audacity and the courage to sing in the face of that despair. So again, hope is huge. I'm going to walk us through hope one more time. There's a science to hope, and this is one of the top three virtues, most highly correlated with your flourishing zest, your energy, hope, and gratitude. These are the top three, what positive psychologists tell us are the most important, powerful virtues. Hope is defined scientifically as basically, you have a goal, a target that you're working that inspires you first. You know, hopelessness is when you have no hope because you don't see your future as awesome. You see it as getting worse and worse and worse. So the first step is, no, no, no. I've got a clear target. I've got a goal. I can see my future, and it's going to be better than my present. Which leads us to the second element. And if you've been watching these, you know I'm repeating myself. And that is by design. We train our coaches in our optimized coach program. We come back to this again and again and again. What are the three elements of hope? One, a goal. Two, agency, and then three pathways. You got to know that your first plan almost certainly isn't going to work. As they say in the military, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Fantastic. But you do the preparation, and then you think of the contingencies, which we'll talk about in the next PNTV on Sea Stories, and how they got Osama bin Laden, all the different contingencies. But you got to know that plan A is probably not going to work, but that doesn't matter. You'll go to plan B, plan C, plan D. You'll go A, A, B, B all the way through the Alphabet, as many times as it takes to get there. That's the science of hope. And that leads us to the final idea, which is the 10th idea out of the 10 ideas in this book. And McRaven says the most important. Never quit. Never quit. Never quit. In the very beginning of the training, they bring out a big bell for the Navy seals, right? And they say, hey, just ring this three times. You won't need to go through any more of this suffering. You'll get a warm night of sleep. You'll get some great food. Life is going to be good for you. All you got to do is ring this bell, and you'll be done. Your torture will be over, right? McRaven says, don't ring the bell. Never quit. Never, ever quit. Now, of course, you may adjust your strategy, as any wise individual would do, but quitting in the ultimate sense of on yourself in your life. Never, ever quit. Never ring the bell, find the next pathway. And again, it might mean blowing up your business and going in this direction, or it might be whatever it's going to be for you, but never quit. Another Navy SEAL wrote a great book called Be Unstoppable named Alden Mills. Navy SEAL named Alden Mills wrote a great book called Be Unstoppable. I read it, did a note on it, and then got to know Alden. He's an amazing human being. And then I read it to Emerson when he was old enough, maybe when he was like 6 years old. Highly recommend Be Unstoppable for your kids. A great little parable he wrote for his sons. He has a playful thing in there, a little character who embodies this idea of Negu. N E G U. We have an optimized plus one on this. We'll link to where Emerson joins me and we do it together. Never, ever give up. It's this frog little statue of a frog inside of a bird that's trying to eat it and it's just fighting its way out. Never, ever give up, Negu. Our kids will run around the house saying, negu, Negu. Never ever give up. Maintain your hope. Never quit. Maintain your hope. Remembering that that's the most powerful force in the universe. We need you to have the hope for your family, your communities, your colleagues, your clients, et cetera. This is how we change the world, one person at a time, together. Starting with you and me today, we maintain hope in the face of the greatest challenges as we rise to the occasion and express the best version of ourselves. Knowing life's not fair. We're not going to argue with reality. It is what it is. Now what? Now what do I want? Moving from victim to creator to hero, striving to be our best as we focus on the small things, remembering the that there are in fact no small things. And those little things are what give us the power and self mastery to do the quote, big things when and as they arise in life. That is some wisdom from this great book. Again, I highly recommend it. It's a fantastic gift for all ages. And tomorrow we will chat about McRaven's autobiography and unpack some more wisdom from C Stories for now, Admiral McRaven, thank.

You for an amazing work and 37.

Years of dedication to our nation. We do not take you for granted, but as granted. And thank you everyone for being here and making it possible for me to do this. And what's the number one thing you got out of this. What's the one thing you know you can move from theory to practice to mastery on? As we optimize our lives and give the world all we've got. Get on that. Make today an awesome day.

Look forward to sharing more with you soon.

See you.

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