Daily Motivations - YOU OWE IT TO YOU

Episode Date: October 25, 2026

YOU OWE IT TO YOU! Advice from the decorated, retired US Navy Seal Officer. One of the Best Motivational Speeches Ever Featuring Jocko Willink. Instagram- Daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorgSupport us PayPal

Do you have any advice to men that are getting older and becoming chronically aware of that? Yeah, lift weights, do jiu-jitsu, go for runs, stretch out, eat good, stop drinking. It's pretty straightforward. If you don't use it, you're going to lose it. Every day that you don't do work, you're going backwards. And it definitely will hurt you, and it'll show up. You can't get away with what you got away with when you were 23. It doesn't work.

You have to stay ahead of it. When you're watching TV or you're looking at Instagram or you're going out for dinner on a date and you go to a movie, I'm not doing that. I'm reading a book. I'm getting ready for a podcast. I'm writing something. I'm preparing for something. Talking to a client. I'm designing something.

I'm thinking about a new supplement. Like, it's just, a guy asked me the other day, are you working more now than you were when you were in the SEAL teams? And the answer is 100%. Yes, I'm working harder now. As I've said since day one, it's motivation is a feeling that comes and goes, and it doesn't matter whether it's there or not. Discipline is infinitely more important. So no matter how you feel, get up and do what you're supposed to do. That's it. And that's discipline.

It's not motivation. If you only did what you were supposed to do when you were motivated to do it, that's leaving it. That's leaving it the chance. But if you're disciplined, you go to what you're supposed to do. That's the way it works. Discipline equals freedom. That's it. I mean, if you have the discipline to get up and get the things done,

you know the weekend where you really only had two things to do for the weekend, whatever it was, you had to write this thing, and you had to answer this other thing. And on Friday, you're like, I'll do it tomorrow and on Saturday. It's basically hanging over your head the whole weekend. worst if you've just done Friday afternoon, the whole weekend would have been a lot better. So just do the thing. Just shut up and go do what you're supposed to do. What would you say are the commonalities between the best BJJ athletes and the best special forces operators that you've worked with?

There's probably the biggest commonality between the two is some kind of strange contrast between being extremely disciplined and being extremely creative. So clearly if you're going to get good at Jiu-Jitsu, you've got to be disciplined enough to train all the time. Same thing with being in the military. If you're going to be a good operator, you have to have the discipline to push yourself in training. But you can't be a person that, you know, lean so hard towards a discipline, structured life that you don't have any creativity because both in Jiu-Jitsu and on the battlefield, you want to, you definitely want to have, be creative and figure out creative solutions and things that people haven't thought of and things at the end. is not going to think of or that your opponent's not going to think of. So you've got to find that person who has a good balance between discipline and kind of a wild freedom, creativity that they can make adjustments.

If you have a mindset that's so highly disciplined and so highly structured, like I just said, then you're not going to think creatively when there's a problem that needs to be solved. So you want to have people that don't mind the discipline and can actually access the discipline in a way that they can utilize it. But you don't want people to be trapped by discipline. And it's the same thing in Jiu-Jitsu. If you have someone that only knows how to do a certain move

and they can't think creatively about other ways to employ that, it's not that they're not going to be good because they are going to be good. But they're going to reach limitations. And, you know, one of the interesting things in the SEAL teams is we didn't have, especially when I was coming up, we didn't have any doctrine whatsoever. There was no written doctrine of any kind. So everything that you learned was word of mouth. You learned from the guys that went before you and that meant if the guys that went before you weren't didn't really know what they were doing you're probably learning a bad way and if you didn't think if you didn't think objectively about it then you might follow someone down a path that doesn't make any sense

So you ended up with a bunch of guys in the steel teams that were pretty open-minded and they could kind of look at problems and figure out how to solve them in the army in the Marine Corps they have doctored doctrine for just about everything This is how you do a raid. This is how you conduct an ambush. They had written doctrine for this. So if you didn't know how, you could just look at a book, which is actually a huge benefit for them. Because if I'm a new platoon commander and I don't know how to do an ambush, I can just look at this book and I can learn how to do it.

So there's some huge benefits to having a very disciplined doctrine that you can follow. But that's one of the odd advantages of the seal teams is that since we didn't have any doctrine, we had to be a little bit more free thinking and that made us a little bit more adaptive in some situations. So it's just like anything else. Your strength can be your weakness, your weakness can be your strength

and you have to be aware if you're aware that it's a strength and if you're aware that it can also be a weakness and if you're aware that it's a weakness and you're aware that it can also be a strength then you can probably optimize the way that you're going to think, which is pretty beneficial.

A guy asked me the other day, are you working more now than you were when you were in the SEAL teams and the answer is 100% yes I'm working harder now you know I'm well I should say I'm working more because I'm working more more time no weekends no evenings really luckily for me I like what I do you've managed to align what you want and what you want to want then I'm sitting on top of each other right yeah and I also don't do a lot of what I don't want to do and my partner on front Laif Babin pointed this out to me like a year ago.

He was doing some stuff that he didn't want to be doing. And, you know, he said, you know, I've got to do this. And I've got to do this. I said, why are you doing that? And he said, well, what do you mean? I said, get someone else to do that. And then, you know, a week later, he's talking. He goes, you know, I was thinking about what you said,

you're really good at not doing what you don't want to do. And I am good at doing, I am good at not doing what I don't want to do. Do something that's hard and do it every day. That's one of the nice things about Jiu-Jitsu. You're going to get choked. You're going to be uncomfortable. where you're going to get smashed. You're going to have to tap out.

Your ego is going to get abused. Go do that. Go do that. Go for a run. Lift. Just do hard stuff. And that's a good way to keep that, I guess, fresh. Look, if you take any idea and you take it to an extreme, then that idea is going to

become bad. I mean, even the idea of extreme ownership, if you take it to an extreme where you're, as you pointed out earlier, you're blaming. yourself because your daughter got a disease or you're blaming yourself because your husband is abusing you. Like there's a point where you think anything go too far. And, you know, yeah, take it to an extreme. It can be, it can become pretty silly or funny depending on how you take it. But for the most part, you're going to run into challenges in life. And if you curl up into a ball and complain about it, that's not going to help you.

And if you say, okay, cool, good. Here's some adjustments I can make to move forward. That's going to be a better move than cowering.