David Marquet with Shane Mac (Part One)

I was at a big corporation and they said, "Well, what's different between us and being on a submarine?" Now, if you wanna imagine what it's like to be on a submarine, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna lock the doors. The other thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put detonation charges around the building. And at the end of 6 months, all of us will either emerge safely or I'm gonna detonate the building and we're all gonna die.

A truism of leadership is that you help to create more leaders. And so with that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to Dave David Marquet, decorated Navy officer, bestselling author, coach, and a true leader of leaders. This is the first of two episodes where David sits down with Shane Mac. They've known each other for years, and it really shows in this latest conversation from Ask. David and Shane have a great rapport, so we're happy to get them together in front of some mics to talk about David's life, his worldview, and in the second part, we're gonna dig deeper into the subject of his upcoming book, "Leadership Is Language." So let's get to it.

What is up?

How you doing? It's so good to see you.

Where are we?

We are in the metropolis of Englewood, Florida.

It's beautiful here.

Yeah, thank you.

Are you from here?

No, but I've been a Florida resident for a long time because 6 months before I joined the military, I realized that whatever state I joined in, I could be taxed in. For the next however long I was gonna be there.

What year did you join the military?

1977.

So you've been taxed in Florida since 1977?

Yeah, because my grandparents lived here. I was living in Massachusetts, which was called Taxachusetts at the time. And I was like, so like when you're 17 years old, like you generally don't know shit, but I did figure this one thing out. And I was like, I'm gonna go down the summer, spend time with my grandparents who lived on the Keys. So first of all, that doesn't suck. And then I'm going to go get a driver's license, which was easier then than now. So I got a Florida driver's, registered to vote, and now I was a Florida resident. Then when I went into the military, I was like, oh, you're a Florida resident, that'll be your home of record. And then for the next 28 years, actually 32, because it was 4 years at Naval Academy and 28 years, I paid Florida income tax, which is zero.

Well, no, we got to go back because when I was 17, I wasn't doing shit. And like, how did you— when you're 17, I don't think I learned learned about taxes?

No, dude.

Uh, like, what were you doing that made you think about that?

You were probably interacting with humans and things like that when you were 17. I was on the math team.

Doing what kind of math?

So here's what math team is. You get on a bus and you go to another school, and I think there were 6 people, and then you have these calculus and complex algebra problems, and you're on a sheet in front of you, sit down, and you try and do them faster and more accurately than the other team. And then you add up our team score, their team score, and you see who win. It's super fun. It's not really a spectator sport.

Did your parents come?

No, no, no. But they always wanted to know how I did when I, when I got home.

Did you do it because you loved math or because your parents wanted you to do it?

No, this I did love. I love math and I love— and I was really good and I love being good and I love being good at math. And I was the captain of the team. And we were good. We were— we would be like second or third in the state year after year. We were— and that was good. It was good to be good. Everyone wants to be on a winning team. But that was the kind of kid that I was. I was very introspective. I spent a lot of time in my head. I was introverted.

Did you doubt yourself a lot?

I—

And math gave you confidence or something?

I had a lot of self-confidence issues, so I did doubt myself and not in the sense of I can't do this problem, but just sort of am I a worthy person on the planet? Am I someone who is going to do well, who people will love, who can live a valued life? And I would— I felt judged. Being judged was sort of the bane of my existence. I felt evaluated, judged. And so for me, I developed a bad behavior, which was I became resistant to feedback. I say I shunned feedback. People saying, "Oh, you could have done that better," it would sting. And I realize now that inside my head, I imagine these two competing angel and devil. And the devil was what I call the be-good self. The be-good self wants to prove, "No, no, I'm worthy. I deserve my paycheck. I'm a good person. You should pay attention to me. You want me on your softball team." And then the get-better self is, "Let's make it better." We seek feedback. Hey, how'd I come across in that meeting? I was like, how much of a dick was I?

This idea of feedback culture is very important to you. Do you do it in your personal life?

Yeah. And I ask for feedback and sometimes—

How do you ask for it? I think this is an interesting one for people.

So here's a game. So, so first of all, everyone can do this. It's a 30-day feedback game. For 30 days, ask for feedback on something, but start really simple, like unemotional, like I go into Starbucks. Hey, how was I as a customer to you?

That's a great one, actually.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because it's usually the other way around.

Exactly. And so you flip it. Hey, how was I? Now, a lot of time, if you just add— that's a very general question, and sometimes you won't get specific feedback. How was the speech? Good. So now I've learned you— I want something specific. How much would you pay for the speech? If you were to tell your friend to go to this event, what would you tell them is the fair price? Because that's something I actually need to know because we're going to do— because we're going to do free. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Free. Okay, that's feedback. All right. Thank you for that. Free. Nothing. You have to pay them to go. How much do I get for showing up?

You took so much time out of my day.

Exactly. This is my life. I know I'm never going to get that 2 hours of my life back, so If you were to— these come in pairs. What should we have spent more time on? And oh, by the way, you have to say what, what should we have spent less time on? So you say at the end of a one-day workshop. And so I've been getting better at being specific. So in personal life, it's things like, how was I as a guest at your house? How well did you feel I listened to you? It always starts with the word how, not did I listen to you, but why, how. You can't ask a binary question if you start with how. Hmm. It's going to be how much, how likely, how sure, that kind of thing. So it's just a trick to prevent you from asking a binary question. Now, this is going to get emotional for you because I don't want it to be, how did you like my workshop? Well, that's maybe could be emotional, but that's still an external thing. That's not me. That's my workshop. I want you to end up at something about me. How well did you connect with me? How well do you trust me? If I were to call you in 6 weeks, how happy would you be to hear that call? 1 to 5. Like, zero. Never call me. Yeah.

What would you ask your wife today?

What's one thing I could do to be a better husband?

Should call her.

Shit.

Why not put it on speakerphone? That's a great question. I mean, if you do it, you'll probably inspire a ton of people to do it. I feel like I should say, how can I be a better son or a better brother?

Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm talking about. It's personal.

Hmm. And it's specific. And making it one means they can't just go off on you of everything you're doing wrong, right?

Hey, how you doing?

Put her up to the speaker.

Um, you're on speaker and you're in the interview.

Oh my goodness.

So the bottom of the phone's a speaker. I'll teach you. It's fine.

Yeah, I'm— the iPhone is more complicated than a nuclear submarine. So I'm here with Shane and we're talking about feedback. And he asked me, well, what one thing would I ask my wife? And I said, what one? What would I ask my wife? And then I said, what one thing can I do to be a better husband? So I'm asking you, what one thing could I do to be a better husband?

So wait, you waited for Shane to ask you to ask me that?

Dude, right there. I was gonna ask you tomorrow anyway, even after Shane left. Yeah, so, yeah, so Shane made me ask you.

Yeah, no, actually I've heard you say in speeches that you were working up your nerve, so pretty good. The one thing that I think you could do better would be to think out loud.

Hmm, say more.

I think that you have such a complex thinking structure and such a unique way of looking at things that you don't even know it and you just assume everybody else is in your head with you and most of us are not there. So you'll start doing something and I'll be like, well, what are you doing? Like, I have no context. And you're like, well, da da da da blah. Like, you should know this. Dude, I'm not in your head. So if you could think out loud a little more, that would be super.

That's pretty— that makes me feel good because it's my own advice.

I know, that's their own advice. Yeah.

The irony of that is amazing.

Okay. So I'm going to make it—

That's it, otherwise you're perfect.

Yeah. That's super awesome. Then a month from now I'm going to ask it again. So that's good. I'm going to work on that and I'm going to ask you in a month how I'm doing. You give me a score from 1 to 5. Okay. So let's baseline it. What would you give me right now? 1 to 5?

I would say like a 2. Sorry.

Shane wrote down 2. What'd you write down? 2?

I wrote 2.

2? Yeah. Okay. See, this is really good. This is really good. See, I'm thinking I'm really like living my, my, my stuff, and you guys are telling me, no dude, you're not.

That's so possible way though.

Yeah, you know, no, look, you're making me better. This is a favor to me. I feel exactly zero stress right now. I feel a little bad that I haven't been a better human in the past, but I'm not. I don't feel protective. It's really weird. I just I, I maybe I should, but I like, I want to know more about that.

I have no more right now. Okay.

All right.

Thank you very much.

All right. Thanks for picking up.

That's the craziest thing.

Yeah. How's your day going? Uh, we'll, uh, we'll get to that later. I don't care. Nevermind.

Don't say you don't care. Hope you have a wonderful day.

I hope you have a wonderful day.

Thank you. You too.

Yeah. All right. Bye. A 2, a 2, man. That I was gonna say that stings, but it doesn't really sting. It, that's, it's great to know. Yeah, because how, how much better it is now I know. My wife thinks I'm out there at a 2, and I didn't know that, and I'm doing all this stuff and it's causing her stress and anxiety. That's— I'm, I'm an asshole.

No, you're not.

You're not an asshole.

You're actually pretty amazing.

Oh, thanks. So are you.

You've heard all this stuff where your brain is really formed at an early age. And so during this time of your life, can you tell me a story that shows you being an adult version of yourself as a young person?

Injustice. For, for some reason, injustice, bullying, people in power taking advantage of people not in power— those things really got me. I can tell you, at the Naval Academy we treat the freshmen pretty badly. We put them through their, quote, paces, and it's very strict. And then that relaxes as you get more senior. And then the seniors actually are the ones who discipline the freshmen. And one of the things that happens is when you sit down at the table is you have this kerchief. So it's a, it's a neckerchief and you tuck it into your uniform so it's not sticking out there while you're eating. And then one of the things you're supposed to do when you get up out of the table is untuck it. Now, only the freshmen wear this uniform. So again, we're coding people in a very visible way in terms of, okay, you're the underclass. Yeah, by this uniform. But what happens is every once in a while one of the freshmen would forget to untuck their kerchief. And for some reason, what we did with them at the Naval Academy, the traditional punishment for that was to make you hop like a bunny down the length of the chow hall, which was humiliating. And for me, had nothing to do with the problem of untucking the kerchief. And so I'm at this point, well, now I'm a senior, so I'm 21, and I'm just like, well, what does bunny hopping and embarrassment have to do with the behavior of getting this thing untucked? And oh, by the way, I could actually go back to the table, the team, and say, the team let him leave the table without untucking it. So it's really a team failure. So this is the kind of the way I was thinking. So as a, as a first classman, you had the power to punish them and put them into the bunny hop, but you also have the power to release them from the bunny hop. And my table was like halfway down the chow hall. So every time one of these bunny hoppers came by, I released them even though they technically belonged to some first classman 5 tables away. So of course all the Plebs liked it, but I became a little bit of a rebel. And then the other seniors came up to me and said, what are you doing to my— that's my guy. And well, you can't do that. I said, well, actually I can. And explain to me how having a person do the bunny hop and embarrassing them, well, they'll think they won't ever do it again. Like, yeah, I don't think that's how it works. I'm like, why didn't— why did the table let him go? And started asking these questions and they would look at me like, huh? And so like I came in with this sense of, questioning, like, why? Why are we doing it like this? And it just— this stuff just didn't make any sense to me. And it felt bad. I remember having to do the bunny hop, and it was just humiliating. And it just made me angry. Didn't make me want to untuck my kerchief.

And do you see injustice now? And does it just, like, repulse you?

It does. It really irritates me. And often it's not because we're evil. We just seem to be living out the position that we're in. Well, I'm in power, you're not, therefore I could take advantage of you. And it's subtle. It's asking people to spend more time away from their families than they need to. It's making people feel bad even though they tried their best and we didn't give them all the tools. You know, it could be more obvious, like yelling at people and calling them names. That's happened to me. Throwing pens at them. That happened to me.

That's crazy. Injustice as a child, you felt it as a person in the military, you felt it, and today you feel it even more.

Yeah. And I think part of it is I felt the victim of injustice, which was kind of weird because if you looked at my life from the outside, you would say, oh, this guy's got it pretty good. He's upper class, white, great education, healthy, reasonably good looking, you know.

Ryan, great looking.

Yeah, yeah, right. We know we never had the term white privilege, but you know, you're— you have white privilege. What's your problem? But inside, I felt— I didn't always feel good. I didn't always feel good. I felt very depressed, often depressed. I contemplated suicide, and I was miserable. High school was a miserable, miserable, miserable time for me. For all you parents out there, If your kid's in high school, have pity on them. Like, you might think it's bad for you, but for me, I think it's worse now because we have so much social comparison. Yeah, you know, I just needed to compare myself with the 450 kids in my class in Concord. Now you're going to compare yourself to 450 million Instagram pictures of everyone, you know, having a latte at a Parisian cafe or on the beach in Cannes.

And it's rising like crazy, depression and anxiety and all these things. And what did you do? Were you depressed all through high school? How did How did you, you know, when you were thinking of suicide, what did you do to not?

I just didn't really have the courage to do it, but I was so upset. At who? I was kind of, I was upset at my parents a lot because I felt, I just, this feeling of judgment was overwhelmingly oppressive.

And they don't even realize it though.

No, they thought they were doing good. We'd sit down at the dinner table and my dad would be, okay, now let's, I'll say a state and you say the capital. Let's go around the table. Montana, Helena. How do I remember that? Yeah, good.

But it was black and white, good or bad.

It was binary. Yeah, exactly. One of my problems was— now I recognize it's an internal mindset. It's about me. It's how I feel. It's— I'm in my head. And what I try to do now is have an external mindset. Well, how's that? How's that person feeling? Why are they reacting like that? What must they be going through? And so he was at an event in a military base with Simon Sinek, and there was this guy in the crowd who was kind of heckling him and being kind of provocative toward him. And at the end, the general came up to Simon and said, hey, I'm really, really sorry about that guy. I don't know what's going on. And then Simon said, that's fine. Can you please just check with him and see if he's okay? So Simon's mindset was, what's going on with that guy? Versus if you're on stage and someone's heckling you, it becomes like the instinct is like, oh, you know, how am I going to react to this? How am I going to not embarrass myself? How am I going to deal with this person? That kind of stuff. That's the internal mindset. But his was like, no, that there's something going on in his life. And it turned out there was— I can't remember, but they checked with him and he was like, yeah, yeah, going through some issues, whatever it was, and he was then grateful and there was empathy as opposed to, I'm going to judge you for why, why are you coming at me like this? And then react in that way. So I think that external mindset for me now is really helpful.

The empathy actually makes you feel better.

Yeah, because if you don't flip it, then it's just about you. How do I explain this? At least the way it feels for me. I'm a turtle in my shell and I bring in my arms and legs and my head and people are coming after me and they're looking and saying, oh, well, that speech wasn't good enough. Oh, I'm confused by what you said. Oh, it would have been great if you pointed the clicker a different way. The guy came up to me, gave me clicker pointers.

You've had— hold on. You've had clicker pointer feedback?

Yeah, I've had clicker pointer feedback. It's— it's—

What did you—

what did you say? Were you like, what's going on in your life?

No, no, I said, well, thank you very much. It was— yeah, I'm better now. Now I seek feedback. So you don't have to do it, but you need to listen.

Yeah.

And sometimes it's good stuff. So the feeling is the stress leaves your body.

You told me about something related to the military, related to therapy. And I was saying I'd been to therapy. I just started going. I've been once before, but, you know, in San Francisco, everyone's open to everything. Like, it's not— it's not a big deal. Everyone actually is in therapy. And in the Midwest, where I grew up in a small town in Peoria, Illinois, when you hear the word therapy, it has this like stigma. And I almost thought it was like this place I was going to go. And it was like I had a problem and I'm terrible and I'm really an injured person and I was like, someone's weak if they went there. Like, that's how I felt. That's how I like, I judged them.

Yeah.

And then you go and you're just like talking about how you feel and shit. And he was like, you know, I kind of feel like I, you know, I was really stressed out. I don't really know. I didn't really know what I was doing or why I was making these actions. And, uh, it's actually, I find it very therapeutic and helpful. And then I told you that and you were like, that would be a negative against you in the military.

Psychological counseling.

That's what that is called.

Yeah. Therapy.

Yeah.

So having a security clearance is a big deal. You can't be on a submarine without a security clearance. And there's many levels. You can't be a submarine captain without a really, really high security clearance. So not getting a security clearance limits your promotability. So periodically you got to fill out these forms. You got to update your security clearance or you're going up for a new higher level. And one of the questions was Have you ever been to psychological counseling? And the correct answer is no. Because if you check yes, then you're subjected to exactly what you said. Oh, you must be broken. How broken are you? Let's figure that out. As opposed to, oh, maybe you're the only person who's actually admitted what's really going on in their life and taking steps to deal with it, as opposed to everybody else who's just suppressing all that. Yeah. Which is what I was doing. So some well-meaning bureaucrat put this question on the questionnaire. Oh, we'll identify the people who've gone to psychological counseling. It'll give us a shortcut to figure out who's got potential mental issues. But the effect is, what's the effect? Never go to counseling, no matter how fucked up you feel, how depressed you are, how suicidal you may feel. Don't go to counseling because then you're going to limit your ability to get a higher level job. So as a result, now we have these— all these maladapted people with high security clearances. Congratulations. And guns.

That's wild.

Yeah.

But these are decisions like that get made all the time. And the intention— I understand the intention. It wasn't misintention.

Right.

But the outcome of it is that everyone has issues, but because no one will talk about them, right, everyone who's just suppressed all emotions is now in control of a pretty lethal and crazy vehicle.

Right, right. And it's not— it's not like we didn't do a whole lot of mental gymnastics. I'm sure everyone understands exactly the impact of that. Every listener understands that. Like, we didn't have to do a lot of mental gymnastics, but we had to take one step beyond the short-term, oh, we'll just put a question on the thing. We have to then say, well, how will other people interpret this and what will be their behavior? What behavior are we triggering? Every behavior you see in your company is exactly tuned to the triggers that you set, the end reward system that you've, you've built in. So if you don't like the behavior, it's not because they're them. They're not choosing to behave that way. It's because your trigger and reward system is rewarding that behavior. So if they're holding secrets, there's something in your company that rewards people for holding secrets and then poof, at the last minute, oh, I have the answer. Oh, you're the hero. Here's your bonus.

Got it.

What?

You know, whatever it happens to be.

Yeah. When I think about simplifying life, I wonder about you in the Navy. And I'm curious. I want to go back to your kind of when that all began for you. You know, you committed to the Navy at an early age. Did it turn out the way you expected?

Pretty much. I grew up in the '70s. The big thing about the '70s was we were in this contest with the Soviet Union, and it's so easy now to forget. We didn't know who was going to win. We didn't know that we were going to win. And I felt passionately about the Constitution, the ideals of the Constitution, which are simply, in my mind, you can live the life you want. You can choose the spouse you want, the religion you want. The profession you want without threat of coercion and violence against you. And that's better than what the Soviets were offering. Not different, not equivalent but different, but better. And I felt passionately about that. So that's why I said, well, I'm going to go in the— well, first of all, what's an introvert to do? I read about submarines. Submarines hide from people.

Really? Yeah.

Their job is to hide.

That's why you got interested in the submarine.

Yeah. This is perfect for introverts.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

You go, where did you read this?

I like, well, I just read the stories of the submarines in World War II and that kind of thing. And they're out there, or like far from the friendly coastline. You're out there and deep in enemy territory. It's sort of a chess game underwater. And I was like, that's for me.

Whoa.

So I wanted to do my part. And that's how I ended up at the Naval Academy. And I told my mom, oh, I'm going to be a submarine commander someday. And she's like, yeah, yeah, right, whatever. But that happened.

She didn't believe in you? Uh, did you think you were going to get there at that age?

Yeah, I was locked in, dude. I was all in. I was goal-oriented, and I worked my butt off.

What sticks out for you when you think about your life in the Navy? Like, I think it's something that a lot of people can't identify with. I don't even understand.

I was at a big corporation and they said, well, what's different between us and being on a submarine? And I said, well, here's what's different. If you want to imagine what it's like to be on a submarine, here's what we're going to do. We're going to lock the doors to the corporate headquarters here. Okay, the doors are now locked. In 6 months, I might unlock all the doors. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put detonation charges around the building. And at the end of 6 months, all of us will either emerge safely or I'm going to detonate the building and we're all going to die. There's no helicopter on the rooftop. There's no basement exit. Not a single person is going to escape. On a submarine, we all live or die together. And when you're on it, it's just part of the air you breathe. You don't realize the power of that. So when I send a guy into a tank, like we have sanitary tanks. They're called sanitary tanks, but they're really sewage tanks. And I say, I need you to go down there, clean a section and take some measurements to make sure that it's not rusting through and come back. And when he comes back an hour and a half later covered in slime and he says it's 0.25 inches, it's 0.25 inches because he measured it and you believe him. It's not 0.25 inches because he wanted it to be or because he was hoping it would be. It's because he put the ruler there and he measured it and he came out to the best of his ability. It's 0.25 inches. So there's this level of trust and teamwork that is largely absent because we don't detonate buildings after 6 months.

Interesting.

There's no exit. Like, one executive doesn't exit.

What if it was like that?

I think it would make it harder. I don't know why we have those programs. I think it incentivizes individualistic behavior as opposed to team-oriented, goal-oriented behavior.

Did having this life-or-death-is-the-only-option mentality lead to your management style?

Yeah, because I thought I was gonna die.

Interesting, your own fear.

Yeah, so intent-based leadership is hard because what it means is you have to give up control. You have to act contrary to your instincts. You have to say, hey, well, what do you— well, how about you make that call? When you think you know the answer, you're like, no, no, no, let's do it and we'll move, we'll keep moving. 'As opposed to, yeah, let's take 5 minutes and you come back and tell me.' Like, that's hard for me because you feel like nothing's happening, but you're really developing leaders. Very powerful. And so people would say to me, 'Well, you must have had a lot of courage and, you know, you did something different than the system.' And I said, 'Yeah, maybe it seems like that to you, but it didn't seem like that to me.' For me, it was fear and panic because if I gave an order, not knowing the ship, if I gave an order, and they did it, maybe we'd live, maybe we'd die. That's a motivator. Death. And so in my mind, it's like, well, I can't do this anymore. We have to do something different. Why don't you guys tell me what we should be doing? Okay.

So where you started, take me to the beginning of your career and you walk on the Santa Fe was the boat, right?

Yeah.

So, and you started, were you a command and control leader? Were you telling everyone what to do?

Oh, oh yeah. Oh, if there were an award for command and control leader, it would have been all over my wall. It was because I was being promoted. The leadership definition when I was 17 years old at the Naval Academy, they give me a book, the United States Government, and it says leadership is defined as directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of others so as to obtain and command their obedience, confidence, respect, and their loyal cooperation. The thoughts, directing their thoughts. And I was like, yeah, give me some. And because I was the math team geek And I was, I could kind of sit back and I would see, oh, I see the problem, dude. I stopped doing that. Do this instead. Oh, are you thinking again? Naughty, naughty. I'll do the thinking. You just do what you're told. And then things would get better because I could see the problems. But of course it was just sort of me ordering them for a temporary bump. And then when I left, things got worse. Which was proof of how much they needed me. Not that I hadn't been able to inculcate the program into the people and the processes.

But that single thing right there, I think a lot of people would think, since I left and it got worse, they need me.

Right. So if that's what happens, then you're an achiever. And achievement's okay. It's good, but it's not leadership. Leadership is embedding whatever genius you have in the team. It's about other people. Leaders, when they leave, are barely noticed. So here's a question. Who has more stress, the CEO or someone at the bottom of the hierarchy? Everyone can think about that for a second. The answer is the person at the bottom of the hierarchy. Say, well, the CEO's got these monumental decisions to make. Stress isn't about the size of the decisions. Stress is about how much control you have over your life. And the CEO has much more control over his or her life than the person down at the bottom of the hierarchy. And there are studies that measure— you can measure stress physiologically from markers in your, in your blood and your weight and your body habits and that kind of thing. And they're all consistent. People with less control, even people who just think they have less control, have more stress. And so when we're giving people control, we're actually enabling them to be healthier human beings. This is the moral imperative of leadership. Leadership is more like being a doctor than being an auto mechanic.

What do you mean?

Doctors have a moral imperative. They're holding people's health in their hands. So if you screw up, you're harming, potentially harming another human being. So to me, there's a morality attached to how you treat other human beings. There's no—

I got it.

There's no morality attached to how I treat my car. Yeah, I drive it over a pothole. Yeah, it's not good. It's not immoral. But if I treat another human poorly, To me, there's a morality. The difference is the doctor knows pretty quickly whether what they did was harmful to you. Leaders, you won't know because some of these effects of toxic stress won't manifest themselves for 10, 15, 20 years in somebody. But we share— if you accept the role of leadership, you're accepting a moral burden to treat humans in a way that their lives will be better. And I, and I don't think that we acknowledge that enough.

How do you balance the desire to empower people with the natural tendency to make yourself invaluable instead of replaceable?

You do a time warp in your head. I call it fast forward. You speed up your life in your head and you imagine 6 months, 6 years, 6 decades in the future. And then you say, okay, I'm now 6 months forward and I'm looking back on today. How do I wish I'd acted? How do I— what do I wish I'd done? Do I just tell them the answer? And then 6 months from now, they're still coming to me, asking me all day long for the answer. Or do I wish I'd spent a little more time understanding their thinking? And oh, by the way, they may actually be right. And/or conveying the thinking behind the answer. And yeah, it's frustrating because we're not doing anything, we're just talking. And if you go further out, you end up really asking, well, what is, what is my life about? Is that the end of the day I did all this stuff? Oh look, I have a nice house and great car. BFD.

I told you this was going to get to the real stuff. So real quick, if you dig this and you think someone would benefit from hearing what David is saying, would you please let them know? Share this with somebody in your life. @StartByAsking is the way to reach us at Twitter.

Let us know what you think.

We'll amplify it, and let's help some more folks find their way through the weeds. Make sure you stay on this feed and watch for the second part of our conversation with David next week. It's great. We promise. Language Is Leadership is the new one from David Marquet.

This is Ask.

Say hey @StartByAsking on Twitter and share this with the people you appreciate. Thanks for giving us some of your time today, and look forward to seeing you next week for part 2 with David Marquet on Ask.