EntreLeadership - #226: Jocko Willink—The Discipline Advantage

Episode Date: October 9, 2017

Once upon a time, Jocko Willink—a retired and highly decorated Navy SEAL (he’s both a Silver and Bronze Star recipient)—traveled the world on military missions. These days, as a best-selling author and leadership coach, his work still takes him around the globe but to a much different battlefield. Jocko now spends his time helping civilians navigate all sorts of leadership challenges. And whether those obstacles are big or small, the solution for all of them comes down to one thing: discipline. Join us to find out more. entreleadership.com/podcast High-Performance Achievement Work/Life Balance Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. From the Music City, this is the broadcast of leaders, by leaders, four leaders. Thanks for joining the conversation. Our feature interview coming up is with the one, the only, Jocko Willink. He's got a new book out, Discipline equals Freedom. And this is a field manual.

It really is. really unique book and all kinds of goodness. And you're going to really enjoy this conversation. And then one of my favorite parts of this broadcast, we bring you a conversation with a real leader. It happens to be Mike Gonzalez. He's one of our listeners and our All Access members. And this is an especially interesting story to me

because he escaped the rage of Hurricane Irma. So that's coming to you. And of course, we have some free resources for you as well. And then a special treat for you. for you regular listeners. Eric, the producer, comes into the studio from behind the glass with a very, very cool announcement. I think you're really going to love that. So stay tuned. But first, let's get right to it. I told you, Jock Willink, back with us. And boy, we have a fun conversation. So let's get you to it right now. Well, this is a tree Jocko to have you back on with our

entree leadership audience. So before we dive in too deep, how are things? How are they going. What are you up to these days? Things have been pretty busy. Quite frankly, Ken, things have been pretty busy. We've been traveling the world and working with various companies and at the same time writing books, doing podcasts. So, yeah, things are pretty busy for me and the team right now. Yeah, that's great news because that means leaders are being impacted. You do work that matters. Before we get into the book, we'll dive into some of that a little bit. But I would love to have you set the scene for our viewers and our listeners on the type of work you're doing. When you're going in with a company, whether it be a keynote or a multi-day dive or an all-year dive,

what are you getting your hands in? What are you encountering over the last few months and years as you get involved with these companies? Yeah, well, one of the funnest things about this job is that you don't know what you're going to get when you show up at a company. And every company that you show up is going to have different strengths in we. and there's going to be something that you're going to be looking for, you're going to discover that's their friction point or where they're being held back or where the team isn't functioning well together and that we attack that problem and we get it solved. But it's very exciting and fun because every team you go into, they're slightly different.

Now, the problems that we see, you know, it's the same whatever five, six, seven problems that we wrote about in the book Extreme Ownership. The problems are the same, but there will be different areas where the company is doing well and different areas where they're doing poorly, and those are different depending on which company and which type of leaders we're working with. What are you encouraged about when you look at today's business environment? Because you're out there on the ground. I love it.

You know, it's a new mission field for you, and you're going in with your team, and you're getting in deep with these companies. They're all fighting the flight to win in business. But what are you encouraged about? Oh, here's bad news. I want to hear some good news from the front lines. Well, I'll tell you, one of the best things about the business that we're in, now, sometimes we get called in, let's say, by a board of directors to go and help fix a company that's

doing badly. And that happens some of the time. I would say most of the time, we are actually going in to companies that are doing well or they're doing good or they're even doing very well or very good, but they just want to do better. And that shows that whoever's bringing us in, if it's the CEO, the CEO is a humble person who's doing well, but wants to do even. better. And so when you show up and work with a bunch of people that just want to do better and they're already doing well, that's just a good time. And it's great to work with people like that. I want to talk about a very important leadership issue, and that's buy-in. You know, obviously we think of Jock Willink and the other leaders on your team as having combat experience

and people's lives are on the line is what you're talking about with your experience. But I think leaders everywhere are going, boy, I tell you what, I just don't have the buy-in that I need, how do you take that on from your perspective? How do you get buy-in across the board? This is something that people struggle with all the time. And actually, the answer is surprisingly simple. And that is, if you want your team to buy in, let them come up with a plan. Let them do the creative process.

Let them buy into something that they made up. So, you know, for instance, Ken, if we were going to run a project or let's say a mission, some kind of a tactical mission, and I said, okay, Ken, I'm your boss. This is the target you've got to hit. This is the people I want you to take. These are the vehicles I want you to use. This is the route I want you to take in.

This is how I want you to take down the building. This is the route I want you to use back here. If I gave you the whole plan, well, whose plan is that then? Yeah, it's yours. It's my plan. So even though, you know, I want you to buy into my plan, it's my plan. So you might, you get out there in the field and now you hit an obstacle, whatever it is. There's something comes up.

and how motivated are you really to overcome that obstacle if you're dealing with my plan, which, by the way, you might hold a little bit of a resent me because I'm forcing this plan down your throat. So now you hit your first obstacle and the first thing you do is go, look, Jocko didn't think of this and his plan. See, his plan wasn't good. I'm just going to go back to base without completing the mission. And then you come back to base and you say, hey, Jocko, you had a bad plan. You should have listened to me. So how do I get you to get by in?

I say, hey, Ken, here's the target we want to hit. can you come up with your best plan? Let me know what you want to do and how you want to execute it. Now you go to your team, your team and you get together. You come up with a plan that you created and you bring it back to me. And maybe I got to adjust it a little bit. Maybe I make some small corrections to what you've got. But broadly, it's your plan.

And now when you go out in the field, it's your plan. You're completely bought in because you created it. And what happens when you hit an obstacle? You either go over the obstacle, around the obstacle, or you go through the obstacle. And that's the way you create buy-in. And the thing that intimidates, I think, leaders about that is they think, there's two things that they might think. Number one is that if I let them come up with a plan, then they won't see me as the leader. And that's not true at all.

That's patently false. As a matter of fact, when you give people some room to work, they actually respect you more as a leader. The other thing that people think is, if I let you come up with a plan can, you're going to come up with something that's so wildly crazy that it'd be nothing close to what I would want you to do. that's also untrue. I mean, we're in the same business. We're working together. We're working together all the time. We have a history.

We know what works and doesn't work. You're going to come up with a plan that's pretty close to what I came up with. And by the way, if it is so drastically different, I can, you know, as the boss, say, hey, we need to take another look at this. Or what about these things that you might not have thought of or, you know, we can talk through it to get you to a solution that's closer to what I think and you will think is going to work. I want to do a follow up on buy-in. I think that's really, really good.

But I want to do a follow up. and pardon me for borrowing maybe from a military example here to the best of my ability. This is like from watching movies, unfortunately. So, you know, what happens when you've been given a mission? So it's coming from headquarters or from your commanding officer. And it's like, Jocko, I need you and the team to go do this. And you instantly know, or at some point you know, there is a potential for huge sacrifice and loss here. Now, in the business world, we're not talking about loss of life, but it could be painful.

and there could be, but we've got to take that hill, if you will. How do you get buy-in there where it's not just so much about, hey, get them in on the plan, but when everyone on the team realizes this could be hazardous, there will potentially be some losses, but it's just something that has to be done. What do you do there? Well, first of all, when you're going on combat operations, it doesn't matter what you think. there is always a possibility to take catastrophic losses. And when we were working in Iraq, if you roll over an enemy IED and improvise explosive device

in the road, you could lose eight guys in an instant. And that could happen on any operation from a high level, high risk, let's say direct action raid to capture a kill a bad guy or a logistics route where you were just going to pick up some water. It could happen on either one of those. So there's going to be risk in every combat operation, just like there's risk in things you do in business. Now, if I am being directed to do something that I don't think is smart, well, I'm going to raise my hand and I'm going to say, hey, boss, here's what you're telling us to do. Here's the impact it's going to have.

There's going to be huge risk for catastrophic problems or losses. And I'm going to say, here's another proposal. Here's another way that we could get this mission done. Let me just put this really, really simple way. there's no boss that is going to order me to do something that's going to that you're going to take massive casualties without being able to mitigate the risk. And it's the same thing. If you were working for me, Ken, and I said, hey, Ken, I want you to do this. I want you to go and do this with your clients. It's going to cost us a lot of money. We're not going to make any profit and we're

probably going to lose some business while we do it. Why would I tell you to do that? Right. You know, why would any business leader tell anyone to do that? And it's the same thing in the military. The idea of military guys being ordered to do something. something that is going to cause catastrophic loss of life for no reward is not really true. Now, can there be situations where you have a target of strategic value or you have something that is strategically important to an entire war and someone needs to go and execute that mission? Yeah, it is possible. And sometimes the risk can be very high. And in those cases, you weigh the risk versus reward and you mitigate as much risk as you can. And then you go execute

commission. Yeah, good stuff there. All right, let's move into another area that's just sticky and stinky for leaders as well, and that is tough conversations. So this is confrontation, maybe for somebody who just is not naturally, actually does not enjoy confrontation. Like it comes easy to people like me. It's just part of this contact sport, but they struggle with it. Or we see a lot more of these stories now that, hey, you can fire a customer. If the customer's just wrong, because sometimes they are wrong. Hey, you just, hey, get out of here. But it's a tough, messy conversation. Talk to us about that. So I got to ask this the other day, actually, and it's pretty interesting because the fact of the matter is, in not just my career in the SEAL teams, but my whole life,

I haven't had a lot of really tough conversations. I've had a few, and I'll tell you why. The reason is because I don't mind tough conversations at all. And so my recommendation is you have the tough conversations early. And the mistake that leaders make is they don't want to, they don't want to have that, let's say on a scale of one to ten, they don't want to have that tough conversation when it's a level one or a level two. They hide from it. They get scared of it. They don't want to confront the person. And so they let it go. Well, now, you know, a week goes by, a month goes by and and things continue to move in the wrong direction. And now that uncomfortable conversation has moved to a four or a five. And by the time, and they still avoid.

it, they still don't want to have the confrontation. By the time we get to a level to where the person actually has to talk to the individual, now we're at a point where this is a level 10 hard conversation. And that's what makes it so challenging. So I recommend to people all the time. It's just like any other problem that you might have in your business or in your life. If you ignore the problem, it's not going to go away. It's actually going to get worse. And if you have a tough conversation that you need to have, the longer you wait to have it, the tougher that conversation is going to get. So, you know, if you were working for me and you made a mistake or you showed up late

for work, you know, I could have a real quick and easy conversation and say, Ken, hey, are you good? I mean, you were late for work today. I mean, is everything all right? Do you, are we good? And you say, oh, whatever, you had a flat tire or whatever the case may be. And that's cool. That's great.

You realize that, you know, oh, yeah, Jock was paying attention to what I'm doing. So, okay. But if I don't say anything to you, well, then a couple days later, you could be late again. and now it's a little bit harder of a conversation because now you're consistent to me. And we could go all the way. If I don't say anything and you're late 10 times, the conversation that I need to have with you is almost like you're fire. Yeah. And I let it get to that.

So if you want to have less tough conversations, have the tough conversations early. Just like if you want to have smaller problems, deal with the problems as quickly as you can. Yeah. I want to do a follow up on that. What's your philosophy on letting people go? when is the right time? Do you have a long leash because you're having these conversations or is it a pretty regimented amount of time? This is how we're going to handle problems. And if it not, if it doesn't get better, we're going to quickly move on. What's your take? It's actually a

great follow-up question because it's the same type of theory in that if you're late, you're late once and I can say, hey, Ken, you know, come on, you need to be a work on time. And if you're never late again, we don't have a problem anymore. If you're late again, the conversation becomes a little bit more stern. Hey, Ken, you know, that's two times in two weeks. Everyone's sitting around here waiting for you in these meetings. That's costing us time and money. You need to show up on time. And you might say, hey, Jocco, I'm sorry, I had some things going on. Won't happen again. Doesn't happen again? Great. No problem. We can move on. If it happens again, now of a sudden I got to put some paper in front of you. And I got to make sure I'm being perfectly clear as a leader

that you understand. Hey, Ken, you know, I know we just had a brief conversation the last couple times you were late, and maybe I'm not making myself clear enough, but here's what I'm doing. I wrote this down. I want you to sign this piece of paper that says, hey, at our company, we are on time. That's what we do. And if we aren't on time, there's going to be consequences. And maybe that's what it took. And maybe I wasn't strong enough in the first conversations. And now you realize and you go, hey, Jack, I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was that big of a deal. No problem. And now you're never late again, right? Maybe it isn't strong enough for you. Or or maybe you're a person that isn't adapting to what I'm trying to tell you.

And so now you're late again and I've got to come in with a piece of paper that says, hey, that was your fifth time being late and this is what's going to happen if you're late again. You're either going to get demoted or you need a dock for pay or possibly you're going to be terminated. Now, that might be it. You go, I don't want to lose my job, jocco, I will never be late again. I'm going to set three alarm clocks. We're good. Right.

And that's great. And that may work. Or you might be just a person that needs to be really. really learn a lesson and you're going to learn that lesson when when you get terminated. Now, in both those cases, again, going back to the other question, if I wouldn't have said something for those first five conversations, then the first thing I did was come up to you and say, you were late five times, you're fired. How am I going to feel about myself?

I'm not going to feel good. And the reason I'm not going to feel good, and this is why people have a hard time actually firing people is because I know that if I didn't say anything to you, if I didn't give you any precursors, if I didn't give you any advice and I didn't coach or mentor you into what you needed to do. And all I did was just wait until the last moment to fire you. I know that I have been a bad leader. And so it's going to feel bad when I fire you. Now, that can happen at any time, right? That can happen at any time. So if I do the other thing, which is I have good conversations with you the whole way and I go through the process of coaching you and mentoring you and telling you

what's what. By the time I'm getting to actually letting you go, when you come into my office that last time after you've been coached and warned, you know what's coming. I know what's coming. And we both walk out of there respectfully knowing that I did what you did. And you know that the person to blame for this is not me. The person to blame for this is you. You had every opportunity. You were warned several times. And you've got to get your act together. And I wish you best of luck on your next job. Yeah. I want you to talk to leaders right now about developing other leaders. What can we learn from the military about preparation, readiness, teaching, guiding, pushing out there, letting them begin to lead on their own so that you're constantly

moving men up the ranks. I think that's something that we can really admire and take from the military. So in a corporate or small business setting, what can we learn from the military on? Developing leaders? In your question, you actually answered part of it, for me, the answer, which is if I want somebody to step up into a leadership position, I'm going to put them in a leadership position. I'm going to move them up. I'm going to bring them to a spot, probably just outside their comfort zone, maybe even just outside their capability, but I'm going to put them in a position where they're going to start to lead things. And if you want to develop leaders, put them in leadership positions. That's what you do. And I'll tell you what, this doesn't only work with the good guys, your front runners,

your high potential people. I've done this with problem children of mine in the past, guys that weren't performing well, negative attitude, you know, thinking that they could run things better. I said, oh, well, you know, you got an attitude like you can run things better. That's great. I need people that can run things better. Why don't you step up and take control of this next mission and we'll see how that goes for you? And I'll tell you what, one of two things is going to happen. Either one, they're going to realize that it's a lot harder than they thought.

They're going to get humbled and they're going to ask for help, which is a positive thing. Or they're not going to ask for help because their ego gets in the way. and they are going to fall flat on their face, which is also humbling, which is also a cure for arrogance and bad attitude. So both those solutions work out pretty well. Okay, I love this. I want to stay here for a minute because I want to play the cynic. I absolutely agree with what you're saying.

But we get people listening and watching right now, they're going, wait a second, Jock, they're not ready. I don't know if they're ready. You're telling me to put them in there in leadership, and I don't know if they're ready. Why? Yeah. Now, of course, when you put them in there, you monitor, you pay attention. You're not putting them in there, you know, shut in the door and let me come back two weeks later and see what happened in the office. No, that's not what I'm talking about.

But you do need to give them enough to room to maneuver, enough room to learn. You can't just be the easy button. And the first question, you know, when I was a task unit commander, so when I was in charge of two seal platoons, so, you know, sometimes my platoon commanders would come in and ask me a question, you know, hey, hey, Jockel, how do you think we should, we should do this operation or what do you think I should do with this guy in this situation? And I'd say, come out in my office, you'll figure that out. You're a platoon commander, go figure that out. You tell me what you want to do and come back, and I'll tell you if I agree with you or not. And that is the way you train people, because if you're the easy button for your team,

guess what, they're going to get trained and conditioned to use that easy button. And not only they're going to come to you with everything, they're also not really learning to make decisions for themselves. So even though you're playing a little devil's advocate, the solution still holds true for sure. You want to get these people into those leadership positions. Again, do you want to risk huge capital or clients that, you know, when I assign a guy to lead a project, that's a huge client that we've never worked with before and I want to knock it out of the park? Would I assign a new leader to take that job instead of the experienced one? No. But if I had a small client coming on board and, you know, we didn't see much potential,

but I wanted to give these guys, you know, a shot. I would put a new guy in charge of that. And then I'd go ahead and closely monitor him and make sure that if he was going to fall flat on his face, I wouldn't let him do it. I'd maybe let him step out of the lines a little bit. Then I bring him back in the lines and make sure he's moving forward. I love the approach of what you're giving to us

because it goes back to the first part of our conversation, which is buy-in. When you send that platoon leader back out and say, you come up with your own plan, then tell me your plan, then I'll speak into it. What you are doing is, are empowering that young man to begin to use his unique perspective through his skills, through his, the way he sees things.

And now all of a sudden you've got a stronger hole because you've got multiple voices when you really need them. Is that right? Am I learning that there? Am I connecting the dots? You're absolutely learning it right. And there's an added benefit to this. If you come up with a plan, when you bring it back to me, I have a detached look at it.

I have a higher altitude view. I'm going to see things that I wouldn't have seen if I had been in the room staring at the maps and the charts this close. I'm not going to see everything. But when I let you plan it, it's like everybody watching football on Sunday afternoon up in the stands, they see what the coach should be saying. They see what the players should be doing because they're not in the game.

Of course, it's different when you're in the game. And that's the same thing with planning missions and planning operations and planning projects. If you get so close into the game and you're on the field and you're shooting and moving or you're blocking and tackling yourself, you can't really have the vision that you need as a leader to make the call and see things that the guys

on the field aren't able to sit. All right, so this is exciting. I told you, folks, we were going to talk about the new book. Discipline equals freedom field manual. Look at this. I got the yellow post-it notes in here on my favorite pages there. So this is exciting. We're going to go through just a little

bit of this. But before we do, describe this book? Why this book now? You know, this book is really, I would say, a result of the podcast that I have, Jocko podcast where I talk about leadership a lot. I talk about military history a lot, but I also, primarily the podcast itself is about human nature and interacting with other humans. And part of that is knowing your own nature, knowing your own personal human nature. So this book, Discipline Quarrenuous freedom is more about leading yourself and how to get yourself to the optimum level and performing the way you want to perform and the way you know you should be performing. That's what it's about. And if you want to, you know, it's in the title. The best way to get to optimal performance

is not through some motivational tape. It's not through some, you know, 12 habits of every successful the way you do is you do it through discipline. That's how you do it. And so that's what the book is about. I love it. All right. So we're going to take on some of the pages here in the book, stress. Oh, my gosh. Everybody listening or watching is going, oh, they're putting a face and a name to their stress. You say, gain perspective. And in order to do that, you must do something critical. Detach. What does that mean? How do I detach from my stress? You know, I use the word detach a lot, because when you are emotional, that's the main thing. emotional about things. You're not making good decisions. That's what drives stress up.

So what you have to learn to do is look for the red flags that you have in your own personality that show you that your stress level is going up. So you don't want to step back. You don't want to take a break from it. You know, if you're if you're one of these people and you're talking on the phone and all of a sudden you start talking with this voice right here, you realize something. You're getting stressed out. You're letting your emotions get the best of you. Same thing. You know, I've been typing emails before and all of a sudden I realize that those keys are getting hit very hard. And I will not press send on that email because I know that that email is being written in an emotional way. So it's the same thing with anything that is causing you stress.

You're getting caught in this storm. And I know you see this. Unfortunately, we all see this with people in our lives. They get caught in the storm of stress. And that could be anything, whether it's business, whether it's, you know, relationships that they get into, whether it's some sort of addiction or substance abuse that they get into, they're in that storm and they can't see out of it. That storm is encompassing their whole vision. And all of us from the outside, we can very clearly see that they are trapped in this storm. And it's really hard for them

to step out and get out of it. So it's the same thing with your emotions. When you start feeling the storm of emotions come around you, you need to recognize it. You need to step away from that storm of emotion so you can see where you can get to a solution. So you can find a way to dry land and be safe again and be calm and get the problem squared away. Yeah, I'm listening to you tell me this and I want people to understand if they've forgotten for a moment who we're talking to. I mean, as a seal, you're under heavy fire at times. And that, I don't know of anything. I can't even possibly imagine or project that. I just, I'm a civilian, I've never been in that situation. The idea of gunfire raining down on me is so foreign to me, but I can,

only imagine how horrifying it is if that's all you're focused on. And in that situation, you all and your men that you command, you've got to detach from the reality that someone's trying to blow your head off so that you can actually move out of there. I mean, that's the context of what we're talking about. That's real stress. At that moment in those situations, the most valuable tool you can have as a leader is to be able to detach from all that chaos and all that mayhem. And it is difficult to do because you're right. You are getting shot at. You can't hear anything. The explosions are going off.

Machine gun fire. It's very, very challenging. And when I would put guys through training, because in the latter part of my career, that's what I did. I ran the training, the combat leadership training to get guys ready to do that very thing. And we would put them under massive amounts of stress. And I would teach them what red flags they had. And there's some very simple mechanical things you can do to step back.

I mean, for instance, if you were, are in a firefight and you're looking down your gun and you're you're that's what you're looking at your whole world is this big and you can't see anything else and i would literally have all the leaders their position in their default position in a firefight would be to take their weapons and go to what's called high port to point their weapons at the sky and therefore they're not looking and this big anymore they're seeing the whole picture and step back away from the firing line and start turning their head and looking around there's mechanical things that they teach you in the SEAL teams to literally you have to turn your head because

they want to make sure that you've detached and you're not just getting target focused. So those types of things for me transferred into really into everything I do. And to the point where if I'm having a conversation, you know, even if I feel an emotional conversation, even in a personal relationship, even with my wife, if I start to hear a tone coming from my wife and maybe I want to reciprocate that tone, I recognize it immediately. And I say to myself, okay, I need to just step back, you know, listen to what she's saying. Let's de-escalate this thing instead of reciprocating what she's doing and bring in some kind of frustration into the argument.

And it's the same thing with you're dealing with employees up or down the chain of command. If I'm getting mad at my boss, I start getting emotional with my boss. I mean, when someone gets emotional or angry or frustrated, what does that do to their argument? Right. It never, it never enhances the argument. That's right. never does. Whereas if I stay calm, keep my emotions in check, and I just continue to present a logical argument for what I'm, for what I'm trying to say or what I'm trying to prove,

then two things are going to happen. Either you're going to agree with me eventually, or we're going to find a better plan because you realize that what I'm saying actually makes sense. Yeah. This is breakthrough because I have an eight-year-old daughter, Jocko, who three or four days of the week melts down on what she's going to wear to school in the morning and sometimes I'm in that crossfire. So this is going to be good. I'm going to get like a plastic gun and I'm going to hold it in the sky and I'm going to look left and look right. And they're going to think I'm an alien, my wife and my daughter, but I think this could help me. I have four kids and I've been through my youngest is eight, my oldest is 18. Yeah. And absolutely. And I'll tell you,

from a parenting perspective and people ask me all the time, what's the difference between, you know, leading your family and leading a company or leading a team? From everything that I've seen, from my personal experience, the biggest difference is that it is harder to detach with your own kids because you have that emotional connection with them. You want more than anything in the world for them to make good decisions, for them to have the best possible life, for them to do the right thing. You want that so deeply in your soul that it is very hard to detach from that. And to do simple things, like allow your kids to make mistakes, like allow your kids to

to do things that maybe aren't the best way to do them so that they can learn. And yet, I have something that I said a while ago about raising kids, and I said, if you're helping your kids, you're hurting your kids. Now, I don't mean that in the extreme way of never help out your kids, but even something as simple as tying their shoes. And if you are helping your kid tie their shoes when they should be tying them on their own, you are literally preventing them from gaining the practice and the fine motor skills that they're going to need to do in their life.

And that's one simple thing. So again, as an emotional person, when your kid starts crying and they get frustrated with something, that appeals to our emotions and we want to help them. And yet, oftentimes it's not the best thing to do. And clearly that's the same thing, not to that extreme emotional level, but when you're dealing with employees, you're dealing with people. I mean, we all want to be a popular leader. I want everyone to think I'm a great guy.

And maybe the best thing that would make everyone love me today is if I say, hey, guys, it's Friday afternoon. I know we're not quite where we wanted to be on this project, but why don't you guys get out of here and go home and enjoy the weekend with your families? And I'm not saying you can never do that. But what if now we don't finish our project on time? And what if now we lose clients because we didn't get our project done?

Now we've got a bad review on Yelp. And instead of us helping our employees, we've actually heard them because now we're looking at less revenue and now they can't afford to pay for their mortgage. So if you're trying to do the nice thing, it's not always the best thing. And I think as leaders, you have to be careful at. Yeah. Great stuff there. Okay, my favorite section of the book, it's page 24, and it says until the end. And you were talking about training in your last answer and training your teams when you got into that role. And you tell a story here about seeing the troops in combat and there was a tendency to relax once the primary objective of the mission was complete. And you tried to train

that out of them because you can't relax until the entire mission is complete. Tell us what you would do to these platoons that they've reached the primary objective and they're on their way back to base or whatever it would be. And tell us what you would do and why that's so important to do it that way. I mean, it's probably a pretty obvious answer of what we do is these guys would hit the primary objective and maybe they had captured someone and they'd they'd gone through a target and now they're patrolling back to base and and just like you said all of a sudden instead of being on their guns and paying attention and being squared away instead they're hey we're almost done and they're not really paying attention and so we would we'd ambush them we'd have our role players

that act as bad guys we'd have them hidden on the route back and they'd come in and attack them and if and if they weren't paying attention the platoons would get slaughtered by our training personnel But eventually they'd realize it's not over till it's over. And same thing in the business world. A great example is someone goes into a new market and they have the big kickoff and they open their new store. They open the new storefront or restaurant or whatever and they have a great kickoff and they create all this buzz and everyone comes in and they have a great first month,

month and a half, two months. And then all of a sudden they don't think they need to continue to press. They think they don't need to continue to uphold the highest service. They think they don't need to continue to go out and try and advertise and bring people in. So all of a sudden, they let down their guard, and the next thing, you know, they look up and this new storefront that had been doing really well is now falling apart. So it's the same thing. You've got to keep going until your mission is completely secure. Second favorite part of the book for me is the couple of pages on the war path, and you define that for us.

And of course, it just means simply a path towards war. And I was reading this, and what struck me, Jocko, is that we, in business, we need an enemy, whether that is the enemy, that is the enemy, customers. So depending on the service we provide or the product that we provide, that is a solution to something. So the thing that we're providing a solution to a problem that the customer has, that can be the enemy. To me, I just hear that and I go, well, I think we'd all do well to really know as an organization, top to bottom, every division, every employee knows what the mission is and we're out here to defeat this. I'm just curious what you think about that, because that's what I took away reading this. You know, you talk about war against him.

or it's a war against confusion, you know, whatever it is. Why is that mindset so powerful for breakthrough and for winning long term? Well, I'll tell you, there's two parts of this. Number one, what you're saying is correct. You know, we need to have something to get after and move towards. But, you know, my point in that being on the war path is being on the war path doesn't actually lead to war. That's not where it eventually brings you.

Where it eventually brings you is peace. And the harder you train, the better you prepare, the more effort you put into strategizing and making sure you can handle any confrontation you might face, the more you do that, the more you're on the war path, the better chance you have for perfect peace. And what you're saying is exactly true. The more you concentrate on your clients, the more you try to solve their problems, the more you do to affect them in a positive way, the better off you are going to be. And it's actually going to end up in a position where you're not in a struggle.

You're actually in a peaceful situation, providing great service and still doing really well from a financial perspective with your own team. I love that. The war path leads to peace. Okay. I love that. Final piece is hesitation. And again, I really resonate with this because we know Jocko from psychological.

studies, there's data all over the place, that we as human beings are not afraid of risk. What we're afraid of is the unknown. That's what paralyzes us. And I've heard a lot, I grew up with two grandfathers that served in the Navy, and my father had a lot of friends that served in Vietnam, and I read a lot of military history. Hesitation is deadly. And I think hesitation is a symptom of this fear of the unknown. I don't know what's going to happen. Again, I'd love your perspective. somebody who's had to fight hesitation because lives are on the line. Well, this is a topic that I covered, I think, in the best possible way, in the kids' book that I wrote, which is called Way of the Warrior Kid.

It's about a young kid who doesn't know his times tables. He's getting picked on at school. He doesn't know how to swim, and he can't do any pull-ups. And he's getting made fun of at school because of all these things. So last day of school, all this kind of comes to a head. He's getting made fun of. He runs behind the library. He starts crying.

And when he gets home, he remembers that his uncle is coming to stay with him for the summer. And his uncle is a guy that was in the SEAL teams. He was a SEAL. And now he's going to go to college, but he's going to stay at his sister's house with his nephew for the summer. And so as they link up and they start talking, the kid breaks down and says, you know, it's not just that I can't do any pull-ups and I don't know my times tables and I'm getting picked on at school. And I don't even know how to swim. And the uncle says, okay, you know what?

all these problems are problems that we can solve. And so he puts him on a program and works with him throughout the summer. But the big fear of swimming and fear of the water is the one that he has to overcome. And the uncle says, you're not just going to learn how to swim. You're going to jump off the bridge, the big bridge over the river. You're going to jump off the bridge by the end of the summer. And so the kid, he starts off by dipping his head in the water. And then eventually he walks all the weight in the water.

And then eventually he treads water. And then eventually he learns to swim around a little bit. And then eventually he swims back and forth across the river. And then he swims back and forth across the river by himself or with his uncle just watching from the other bank. And then he feels good in the water. And so his uncle says, okay, now, you know, summer's almost over. You owe me a jump off that bridge.

And the kid tries to avoid it. And he says, no, you owe me a jump off that bridge. Get up there on the bridge and jump off. Kid goes up there and he gets to the edge of the bridge and he can't go. And so his uncle comes up and says, what's wrong with you? You know, and the kid says, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. And his uncle says, his uncle says, you're afraid, aren't you? And he says, yeah, I'm afraid. And he says, well, that's good. And he says, what do you mean? That's good. You're not afraid of anything. He says, oh, actually,

very different. I'm also afraid of things. And that's what you're afraid of right now. You're afraid of the unknown. Because you've done everything you could do to this point. You know how to swim. You know you can hold your breath underwater. You know you can swim back and forth across this river and over and over again. We've totally prepared you as far as we can. We've gotten you as close as we can. The only thing that is unknown to you is what it feels like to step off this bridge. And the only way to overcome that last little bit of fear, that last little bit of unknown is to take that step. So you've prepared the best of your ability. You've gotten yourself trained up. You've done everything. You've set the stage. There's that last little bit of fear left.

All you have to do is step. And it's the same thing with any type of fear. You're never going to get to a point where you can completely simulate or train for everything that's making you afraid. But you get as close as you can. You train as much as you can. You prepare as much as you can. And what you have to do at the end is you've got to take that step. You've got to cross the unknown. And that's what's going to help you overcome your fear. That folks is a great word. That's why we have him here on Entree leadership. He is Jaka Willink. The new book is Discipline equals Freedom. It's a field man. I love it because folks, you can read this.

I think if you read quickly, you got this in 90 minutes. You can keep revisiting it. I would put sticky notes everywhere like I have done. It is really good stuff. Jock, man, we are so excited for you, the work that you're doing to help leaders. I don't want to ever make light of your service by not thanking you. So one more time, not just thank you for being with us, but thank you for your service, how you served our country and you continue to serve our country through serving leaders.

We appreciate that, my man. We really do. It was an honor to serve, and I appreciate you having me on here and remembering those that truly sacrificed and who I was lucky enough to serve alongside those that truly sacrificed and give us the ability to be back here and doing what we do and enjoying and carrying on this beautiful country and freedom that we love and enjoy so much. Yeah, well said. Well said. We'll have you back soon. on the new book. Thank you very much. Well, I hope you enjoyed Jocko. The book that I mentioned that is coming out. If you're hearing this before October the 17th, the street date is October 17th.

If you're hearing this interview early, get it now. You can pre-order it wherever books are sold, amazon.com and beyond. And his website and the link to his podcast is jocco podcast.com. That's J-O-C-O-Podcast.com. All right, folks, time to give away some free stuff. I told you we had a couple tools coming your way. And first, we've got Dave Ramsey's high-performance achievement lesson. That's right, Dave teaching on this very important topic. Dave has run a marathon.

He certainly has won in this marathon we call business. And the outline of this talk is absolute gold and it's absolutely free. Now, we normally sell this content, but we're giving it to you fine folks for free. Okay, so you get it a couple of ways. You text the word perform to 33444. That's 33444, or Eric the producer has the link in this episode's show notes at entreleadership.com. Click on podcast. I told you about Mike Gonzalez, our Main Street leader, that we're bringing in a profile to you.

In this episode, he is an evacuee from her. Hurricane Irma. And folks, I'm telling you, this guy is very interesting. The name of the company that he is involved with is Perfect HQ. They do digital product design, and I guarantee that you are familiar with their work. If you've ever used Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, on any device, Apple, computer, iPad, then you have experienced their work because they help design that interface. Before the age of 18, Mike was recruiting. to Apple two different times, but turned down the offer to start his own company. So I respect anybody that tells Apple, hey, thanks, but no thanks. So here's just a bit of his story.

So my name is Mike Gonzalez. I'm the founder of a creative agency called Perfect. We're based in sunny South Florida. We're a team of 10, small business. We've been in business now for about 13 years. I actually started the company when I was 16. I was homeschooled and grew it into a organization that works with tech companies all over the world. And it's really funny that we're having this conversation right now because the fact that we work remotely allowed me to evacuate my home because of Hurricane Irma that blew through our area, I'm able to now work in a whole other location. So that's one of the things that we really love about working remotely.

And so it's really neat that I was able to leave South Florida for the storm. I actually reached out to Laura Beth, my coach, told her that my wife and I were going to be in the area and I wanted to stop by and just take a tour of this tour. and meet everyone here at Entree Leadership. It actually took me over 13 hours just to get from South Florida up to the Nashville area to actually find safety. I was literally on vacation on Labor Day in St. Augustine, making my way back down to South Florida to get started for the week.

And then we see bulletins on the news saying that Hurricane Irma is headed to South Florida as a major Category 5 storm. and we had never really been through. My wife and I had never really been through a Category 5 hurricane before. And so we knew what to expect for maybe a category 1 or 2, but a 5, we were a little concerned that our house probably wouldn't make it. So my wife and I both worked together in different capacities in our company. And so we quickly put the evacuation plan into action.

I boarded the house up. She got all of our resources, water, you know, and there was no water on the store shelves. Gas lines were, you know, immense. There were fights breaking out at some of the local stores for goods, but we managed to find all the resources we needed, and we left. It took us almost three days, a little over three days,

to get from South Florida to Nashville, which is typically a 12-hour drive, but we had to drive all the way through. It was very interesting. I mean, even I remember one night, as we're working our way up, in the South Georgia-Atlanta area, we were just sitting in a parking lot for hours, just trying to get to a place where we could probably pull over and find a hotel and spend the night

just to make the rest of the trip up there. It's not easy to just up and leave any sort of business to find safety before a hurricane. I mean, a lot of small businesses usually lose a lot of money, a lot of customers during that time. Thankfully, the fact that we're remote allowed me to start sending emails and coordinating with my team members who weren't necessarily in the direct path of the storm to take over certain roles within the business while I was on the road. I remember just in between rest stops, I would check my phone, make sure that contracts were sent out on time, that project deliverables were sent on time. We were in the middle of one particular big deliverable for a client where one of our designers

had to stop everything he was doing, drive hours to find safety, then send me an email to let we know that he's safe to then continue to do the work while we have a major client at the time that was waiting on resources from us so they can ship their app. But it was a very chaotic, stressful time, but having the systems in place that allowed us to, you know, jump into that emergency mode and delegate the key roles within their business allowed us to do that. So when I think about business, a lot of people imagine maybe quitting their full-time day job and starting their own company, maybe they want to work from home like I do, you really have to have the right temperament to do this type of thing. And I think a lot of people don't realize what goes

into running a business. And if you understand to the principles that even Entry leadership will share within their coaching and a lot of the mastermind groups, it makes a lot of these challenges that you run into running a business a lot easier. For me, running a business really means that I need to look at why I'm doing what I'm doing, right? Because there are a lot of times where, let's say, we don't necessarily have the right pipeline of sales coming in, or we have a position open in our company and we can't fill it, or we have an emergency where we have to evacuate. All of these things can disrupt our day-to-day business. A lot of business owners really focus on what they can do for the company, right? They find themselves always working in the business

instead of on the business. And that was one of my biggest challenges early on, where I knew how to do it. I had a specific way in what I wanted to do, and so I'd rather get my hands on it and just take care of it. But when you have disrupting emergencies like a hurricane, that's when you really need to understand the value of delegation. And that's where the owner shifts his role from working in the business to working on the business. So I began to look at all of the areas in my business that could potentially be delegated.

Because there was a point where I was the designer, I was the sales guy, I was the customer relations person. I was the, you know, coder and developer in my field of work. But now I'm at a place to where we looked at all of the areas in your business. And I challenge anyone to look at every system in their business. I mean, for example, in my company, we're a creative agency. So we have the creative teams. We have the administrative team.

We have our vendor relations teams. We have our engineering team. All of those aspects at one point when you're starting, sometimes it's handled by one to two people. And if one person drops the ball, it's so tempting for the founder to jump in and save the day. But having systems in place, understanding how each task can be done allows other people to pick up where one person leaves off. And that allowed us in this time of emergency to delegate those key areas that were so profound for the business to stay running throughout that emergency situation. So there's this principle called deferred gratification. and this whole concept of living below or within your means, saving for a rainy day,

understanding that it's not always going to be, you know, you're not always going to be at the height of your business. And we know as business owners what it's like to get started, to, you know, pound the pavement, get sales running, build a reputation for your brand. But there will be times where crises will break out and what you are depending on to keep the lifestyle that you may have. maybe it's a large office, maybe it's a large payroll, maybe great perks or benefits. If one thing happens, that could disrupt your business overnight.

And so one of the things that we began to do early on, especially living in South Florida, is that we know that a hurricane could strike any time within hurricane season. So we implemented some of the principles of profit first that were taught even. And we set aside about nine months for us within our business of emergency cash flow on hand. And then from there, we also made sure that we had things documented so that if I was out of place as an owner, I had someone else who could step in and take over. And a lot of owners, again, we do this naturally. We know what to do. We know how it works.

But not everyone can get access to what's inside of our head. So it's very, very important to document. Another thing that we were beginning to do, even within our own business, is to allow other people to ask us questions. Because we might do something one way. But another person in our team who's being empowered into that leadership position would want to understand why I did what I did so that they can now improve and build on top of that. You don't want to stretch yourself thin. You want to make sure that you always have margin. Margin in your time, margin in your budget, margin even in your workload.

Because there's times where we'll take on high volumes of work, emergency strikes, and now our clients are missing deadlines and a lot's at risk. But if you set margin in place and communication, sometimes you don't feel comfortable sharing, hey, I'm going through a tough time right now. You know, it's okay to be proactive and tell your clients, hey, we're experiencing a crisis. We're going to have to redefine our deadlines. We're going to have to redefine our budgets. We might even make concessions with some clients if we find that, you know, they're going to be in a tough spot because of the situation. But a lot of people are willing to understand emergencies and what that does to a business.

But the key thing is live with margin within your business, within your budget, within your time, and document everything that you have so that other people who are on your team can step in and lead the way. One thing if I were to just encourage anyone who's listening right now is remember that your business is a tool to solve problems and that you as the leader have the power to empower other leaders. and no matter what challenges you run into, what walls you face, whether it's a hurricane, dip in sales, or a culture challenge, know that the mission and the purpose that you're building in your business is worth it. So stick with it, don't quit, and you will come out strong in the end. Big thanks to Mike for his story and for being a part of our All Access tribe. This guy is a thoroughbred.

Now, we were talking a little bit about tech or we were hearing about tech from Mike, and this is really fun because Eric the producer has joined me in studio, and he's very excited. He just showed me what he's about to share with you. He showed it to me before we started recording, and this is cool. Eric, welcome into the studio. It's an honor, and what we have for the audience today, podcasts are a little niche, a little more technical. And one of the things like my mom even did this last week was say, Eric, I really want you. here this one part of an episode. And then I say, where was it?

She then says, go to 39.12 as like a marker. Well, I'm with some friends. Taylor and Zach Estes last night. Never been before. They're new friends. They actually love this podcast. They even know more about podcasts than I do. It's amazing.

And what they do is they share specific parts of episodes all the time with one another. So there's this app called Overcast. And what you can do within one click of a button, if there's a certain part you like, you just download that app you find the timestamp you say share it current time and you can text it to anybody and they receive it they don't have to have the app downloaded

but here's just a sample I like this bit of a past episode Oh is this something from a past? Yeah, this is yeah. Watching something and the kids may be getting a little scrap I got my own sound system downstairs in the living room I don't even raise my voice

nothing just Yeah that may be one of my favorite parts of any episode not because I'm saying it but because that idea is brilliant, and I still don't have that button from Will Rutter, our engineer. I want to have that on the desk at all times. I'm stopping by his desk, and I'm going to get that, and I'm going to harass my kids into submission.

Yeah, and so that app, it's called it Overcast. Just download it. 80% of the market uses, like, the podcast player, Android uses Google Play, but this is just a third party. I would check it out because it's the best user experience for sharing a podcast episode. And it's free. And it's free.

There you go. Good stuff. Thank you, Eric, the producer. We need to get you in the studio more often. While you're here, Eric, could you use a little bit of help with some life balance? Your newlywed? Well, after hearing Jocka's a discipline thing, keeping a balanced being a newlywed, sure. Okay.

Well, InfusionSoft has got a great tool for us, and this is really important stuff. How to achieve work-life balance? So let's just give you a snapshot. 70% of small business owners are reporting that they sacrifice family or vacation time for work. that's not okay. That's not a good thing that will not sustain itself. So InfusionSoft in this

how to achieve work-life balance really guide you through how to make that reality. They're going to give you actionable tools, apps, and techniques from the experts on how to work smarter and get unplugged

when you need to, specifically on vacation and specifically when you need to be with the family. So great stuff there. They also have case studies from three different entrepreneurs that have some best practices. So very, very important and very, very valuable.

Here's how you get it. Infusionsoft.com slash worklife balance. That's infusionsoft.com slash worklife balance or we have the link for you in this episode's show notes. Well, next week is going to be really, really fun. Our Entree Leadership Master Series event will be taking place. It's the most exclusive and intimate event that we put on for leaders. And so we're going to be grabbing conversations from listeners who are attending. We'll have a special interview and more goodies. So stay tuned for that. On behalf of Eric the producer, engineer Will Rutter and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.