Jocko Podcast - 341: Simple Rules To Become A Better Person and Leader.

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

From Col. Glover Johns, who taught us how to lead. With Good Deal Dave Berke.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 341 with Carrie Helton and me Jocco Willink. Good evening, Carrie. Good evening. Also joining us tonight, Dave Burke. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. To Steve Prozenka, who showed us how to soldier. To Henry DeBoor, who showed us how to die.

To Glover Johns, who showed us how to lead. And to all the doughboys, the ground pounders, the grunts, the American infantry man. past, present, and especially future, to them, this book is dedicated. Of course, is the opening dedication to the book of Outface by Colonel David Hackworth. And I guess it's been a steady sort of just constant in my life to be reading this book over and over and over again. And I was thinking about that line the other day to Glover Johns, who showed us how to lead. and that's a that's a bold statement right for him to put in the beginning of the book to talk about Glover Johns who showed us how to lead and I and I started thinking about I don't think I'd really

given the the attention that I needed to or that I've that I've needed to to Glover Johns now look we've talked Glover Johns we've covered Glover Johns on this podcast he wrote the book the clay pigeons from St. Lowe we covered on podcast 87 But in this book, Hackworth kind of breaks down some of the stuff that he said, some of his, some of Glover John's leadership philosophy in a simple, straightforward and powerful way. That is well worth studying. Definitely some things that we can get into. So, yeah, if you want to go listen to Podcast 87, go back and do that. This is going to be about the leadership principles, not about the Battle of St. Lo at the Clay Pigeons. So before we get into that, let me give you a little bit of background in case you're just going to jump into this podcast about Glover Johns is from about face Here's a little intro to who Glover Johns is Hackworth says I was to report to eighth division first battle group 18th Infantry

It was a nice twist of fate the unit was a direct descendant of the US 18th Which my great great grandfather Jeremiah and his oldest son George Washington Hackworth belonged to when they fought their Hackworth cousin Billy who was with the Bedford's Forests fourth Tennessee Cavs during the Civil War so he's this could you has a connect can you imagine having your relative be fighting for the Union Army and you're in the same unit legit the 18th was military perfection men stepped smartly across meticulously kept grounds starched uniformed blue infantry scarves dazzling shined brass and boots snappy salutes and cheerful good

afternoon sirs marked my journey to the HQ where I'd sign in the spirit of this fine unit was already infecting me the hot stifling windless day the ragged the ragweed pollen that blew in from the adjacent fields covering the camp and immediately activating my hay fever the rundown boring camp itself none of it mattered I was inwardly as inwardly I was transported to an island oasis untouched by turbulent seas and it was all thanks to one man the battle group commanding officer who would forever after be my model mentor and friend Colonel Glover S. Johns was the finest senior infantry commander I'd ever seen or would ever see again we shared a mutual abiding respect almost from the moment we

met he was my kind of soldier and I was his he was a warrior Patten's aid before World War II then during the war he'd hit the beaches of Normandy as part of the 29th division and fought from those bloody beaches from those bloody shores all across Europe until victory was achieved as a battalion commanding officer he'd headed the task force that captured the critical French town of Saint Low chronicled in his own hard-hitting book the Clay Pigeons of Saint Low In Korea, he'd served as Exo, then regimental commander in my own 40th division. His reputation there was awesome.

One story that made its way through the division was that a wild new Exo had come to the 224th, gotten down on his belly in the mud to check the units machine gun fields of fire, and promptly moved two-thirds of the machine gun bunkers that had sat there for two years. I'd immediately thought of my own fighter company renovations and way. to hell that this savvy character had been assigned to the 223rd. I noticed that his blue eyes sparkled like those of a wise and truly tested man who'd long since realized that humor could be found in just about anything. He had seen his share of horror.

His cheeks were rosy and the dueling scar that crossed one of them in no way detracted from his rugged yet gentle old soldier face. The scar, maybe the scar even enhanced it. I don't know, but it sure gave him more character and provided a good yarn to boot. In any event, Colonel Glover Johns was a 49-year-old stud. So there you go. I think stud, if you don't know anything about Hackworth,

stud is the highest category of a human that you can give. That's the pinnacle of respect coming from him. stud. And in fact, he has studs or duds. He says that a bunch in the book. There's two kinds of people. Studs, duds. Some basic info.

Some more info. Let me give you some more info in Gloverjohns. Born in 1912 in Austin, Texas, grew up in Corpus, Christi, Texas. His father went to VMI, class of 1908, but got kicked out for hell-raising. I mean, what does that even mean? Is that in your record? Does it go in your record? Are they like, oh, yeah, Dave Burke was kicked out of the school for hell-raising?

So his dad gets kicked out, but his uncles, he got two uncles. They go to VMI, 1915 and 1921. He, Glover Johns ends up going to, going to VMI. He's rifle, pistol marksman, good at cross-country, graduates with a degree in chemistry, class of 1931, goes over to Germany, studies for a semester. He gets married. He has a son. He gets divorced.

And he's a civilian, by the way. You know, and I couldn't quite figure out. I think he's a National Guard guy, but he's working at a bunch of just normal, normal work life. Some alkali company. He works at the Chamber of Commerce. He writes for the local newspaper. But as part of the Texas National Guard, he gets called to active duty in 1940. And he pretty much begs and maneuvers to get a job going into.

combat which he ends up getting and going to Omaha Beach he goes on goes on on Omaha Beach on D day and D day plus one so one day deep into D day he takes over the battalion because apparently his the person that was the battalion commander was not getting after it so he replaces this week commander and it goes right into the the hedgerow fighting which band of brothers you know if you know anything about D-Day that hedgerow fighting was insane they take crazy casualties in his first day as battalion commander he loses two radio operators and three is three of his battalion staff battalion

staff you losing battalion staff this is not a battalion staff that's sitting in the rear when you lose two radio operators and three your battalion staff constant combat he he's in a leadership position at the battle of st. Lowe and just to refresh your memory on that the 29th division lost more soldiers in the Battle of St. Low than they did on Omaha Beach. So he ends up 11 months in command. He's awarded three silver stars, two bronze stars, a purple heart. By the end of the war, John's unit, Glover Jones unit had lost 2,400 men casualties. That's two and a half times bigger than the number of people in his unit, right? You know, you're

battalion sizes what six 600 people seven hundred people five hundred people something like that and they had had 2400 casualties he's married gets married again after the war does some has another couple of sons he does peacetime tours in bulgaria and turkey korean war kicks off he maneuvers again to try and get to go over there he does commands the 224th infantry regiment the 40th infantry division fought in the punch bowl um in Korea gets done with Korea goes the army war college goes to vmI as the rotsc leader eventually becomes the vMI commandant and in 1960 he becomes commander of the first battle group 18th infantry 8th infantry division and he goes into this whole Berlin standoff when when they were building the wall when there's all these tensions and he has to march or yeah pretty much marching

1,500 soldiers right into Berlin, right through East Germany. They kind of faced down the Soviet Union. There's a little anecdote in here that there was some guard, some Russian guard, or some East German guard that wasn't opening a gate when they showed up. They needed to get through,

and it was a bridge or something like this. And the guy says something, you know, like we're not opening this gate. And he says, well you know you have to open this gate he's like no he says this will start world war three if you come here and then Glover Johns pulls out his 45 and says you're going to be the first casualty of World War three and that dude opens the gate it sounds too good to be true right it almost does right yeah but I don't know man it sounds like legend yeah it could be it could be

oh by the way the scar on his face everyone said he got it in a duel but actually there's a footnote about it here uh Johns received the scar in an automobile woman accident in Taipei he was drunk at the time and barely missed receiving a general court martial upon his recovery yeah because they call it a dueling sorry everyone thought so legends man legends there's some word that can come out it's not true I I really want to believe the one about the first casualty of World War yeah you're gonna be the first casualty yes they're private but it was a big deal and this was a huge event in in the early 60s that whole

standoff with the with the Soviets and after that was done he took a job as an attache in Spain that was his last army job retired in Austin Texas he was a technical advisor on the movie Patton pretty legit died of cancer in 1976 his ashes are spread it at VMI so there you go now Hackworth worked for him and he worked for him during that march for into Berlin and there's great account of all that stuff and what they thought that was going to happen and World War three was on the line this was a standoff between two giant nuclear superpowers and the the word was if World War III starts all these that entire regiments

getting wiped out immediately because they're just they're just no one's going to be able to help them there's a quote in here that's from Colonel John in the book about face he says I drove hard and raised hell when I didn't get what I wanted I made waves I bitched about supply procedures I fought for my men if I thought them unjustly accused by a higher HQ. I fought problems too hard from a love of my men as opposed to someone else's men or my own boss's interests because I had identified too closely with them due to my World War II experiences. I think I saw too many men killed and bled too deeply inside with the result that I was overprotective and Hackworth goes on to say

overprotective he may well have been but Colonel Johns translated his love for his men into one thing that would save them when he was not there to wield the sword himself good realistic training a spree decor and high morale or unabashed cockiness some might say within the units in his command so the last thing is Johns eventually got orders out of the battle group and Berlin. So, so Hackworth's there with him in Berlin and he gets orders to go do something else and he gives a farewell speech and during this farewell speech according to Hackworth he, Johns, broke down the basic philosophy of soldiering which he had, which Hack said was like being let in on the secret ingredients of some magical formula. That's, think about that. This is Hackworth saying he gets this

list of things and it's in the book and you read it in a page and you're like okay cool and and hack says it's like a secret ingredients of a magical formula this is obviously something we should be paying attention to and this is why i kind of got drawn back into it so here is leading and soldiering according to colonel glover johns who taught us how to lead the first one is strive to do the small things well. Strive to do the small things well. There's a quote, how you do anything is how you do everything.

This is a similar idea, right? Because if you let the little things go, then what happens to the big things? You guys had to be super anal in the fighter pilot community. Yeah. There are things you got to be anal

about and I think you certainly have to have a philosophy of it's the little things that will kill you. If you don't do the little things well, It's really hard to do the big things well. Obviously, there's a balance inside there, but yes. How do you, so you know some people are really detail oriented. Some people are not detail oriented.

You got every spectrum in between, right? Yep. How do you get a... Like, who's in charge of the plane's maintenance, your plane's maintenance? So Dave Burke, you have your plane. What, do you have a tail number on your plane? Is that how you identify your plane? Yeah, you have a number and your name on it.

And your names. So Dave Burke's plane. But I don't always... I don't fly that plane all the time, but yes, I've got a plane. Okay. But that's not like my plane. Not like my plane. Is there someone that's in charge of that plane?

Yes. And is he own that plane more than you do, kind of? Yes. And what's his job? He's what we would call a power line mechanic. And that means the aircraft itself, he's assigned to that aircraft, and he is responsible for that aircraft being airworthy, meaning it's legit to fly. How many aircraft is he responsible for?

Usually one. One. Yes. So this is your guy. Yeah. If you're going to have a relationship inside the squadron, and you're flying an airplane, the plane captain of that plane,

you should have a good relationship with that guy. So he's called the plane captain? Yeah. What rank is he? Probably a Lance corporal or a corporal? Damn. It's a young kid with huge responsibility. So he's 22 years old.

22 year old. 22 year old corporal and he's the plane captain. Yes. Okay, so, well, the question I was going to ask is, and man, I thought that guy was going to be an E7. No. Marine Corps, don't play. They're like you all responsible.

100%. So the question I was going to ask is you got people that are naturally very detail oriented. You got people that aren't. Do they are they screening people out when they go to a school or they go into a school Where they're like oh yeah slip knot over here. He ain't gonna be in charge of a plane We're gonna put him in charge of you know something else. Yeah, I would imagine the criteria to make sure those people get to where they're supposed to be and eventually be responsible for an aircraft There's some things along the way that they've had to screen for but I mean this dude's only been in the Marine Corps for like three years Yeah, well, that's the Marine Corps.

God. Yeah, I mean, even getting into aviation, I think there's probably some attributes that they screen for initially, you know, on even which basic MOS or what basic part of the Marine Corps you go to. And then inside that certainly,

even though it's, I think, a relatively fast screening process, the process to be qualified to be a plane captain is no joke. And then how many people does he have on his team? He'll probably have one or two other guys. So, you know, a guy who's responsible

for an aircraft, he'll have probably one other person who's in like the training pipeline, you know, getting certified and getting evaluated. So when I walk out to a jet and I'm going to go man up that jet and go fly it, the plane captain is there and he'll have somebody with him. And he's watching, observing and then he'll be doing more. And then at some point you'll go out a couple months later and like, hey, sir, you know, this other Marine is going to take the lead on today's mission or whatever that might be. And he's kind of doing what we call left seat, right seat, or sort of a training run. So you're saying that the plane captain, he's doing it.

work or he's not doing. Is he is he turning wrenches? Absolutely. Well, the other key responsibility that the plane captain has. This is different in other services, but in the Marine Corps, it's very specific. The plane captain, they call it power line because you're responsible for the line, the aircraft line, all the jets. You're also responsible for the power plants. So these are your engine mechanics. So in the Marine Corps, the engine mechanic, his other responsibility is the nose to tail responsibility of that aircraft. So not only is he the guy like literally from the nose to the tail of that jet make sure that thing is ready to go, he's also the one that is responsible for the engines.

Corporals in the Marine Corps. And as you might have imagined, I had a very, very good relationship with every single plane captain in the squadron. And in fact, my first real leadership job when I first got into the Marine Corps, into a fighter squadron, you know, you spend some time in operations, you learn how to write the schedule. Then they give you a real job. And my first real job was called the Power Line OIC. So I was the officer in charge of the power line division, the engine mecks and the plane captains.

And to this day, probably the best job I had. And what are there, 18 planes in the squadron? 12. 12. And there's one officer in charge of all these landsquare. Is there a senior enlisted guy? Yeah, there's a gunny who's like the most squared away guy in the world. The most square away guy I've ever known, you know, rich pilgrim if you're out there listening.

He knows who he is. Huge, huge impact on my life, massively influential Marine. and 30 plus young Marines. You know, there's sergeants, there's a staff sergeant, but it's almost all Lance Corpals and Corpals making it happen. It's the best job ever. Freaking legit. So obviously in that scenario,

doing the small things, right, is mandatory. It's, I mean, I remember going through the certification process myself because I wanted to know what it was like to be certified as a plane captain. So I was young enough, my career that I had the time to be able to do that. And even just the questions that get asked on these boards to certify these Marines, the level of detail inside that was indicative that the message was they wanted the Marines to understand how important these little, little details were because of what was at risk if those small details get missed, especially in, you know,

a really expensive, really fast machine that has this huge amount of responsibility and says massive asset you can't just replace and that philosophy of the little things will kill you was embedded from the very very beginning so i read a book a long time ago it's about desert one and one of the reasons that desert one failed was aircraft couldn't complete the mission and i'll do a podcast about it at some point but so so they wanted to get the best pilots for desert one to go there flying to iran and do this refueling and rescue the hostages right some of the pilots or at least one set of the pilots the helicopter pilots came from flying Air Force two what's the helicopter what's the president's helicopter the Marine Corps it's

HMX one okay that's the Marine Corps helicopters that's the presidential helicopter okay so maybe it was those guys and those guys they're not playing around any issue with any that bird at all and it's not flying yeah and so there's in the main rotors on a helicopter there's hydrogen inside. There's like a tube that has a hydrogen in it. And then there's a hydrogen sensor that will tell you if there's something wrong, if there's a crack, if there's something wrong with those blades, this hydrogen sensor goes up, oh, we got a problem with our blades.

We need to land. And that's the way that they keep those things safe because you can have, you know, some kind of a stress fracture or something in your rotor blade. And if that thing comes apart, you know, you've got major issues. well the the like the Navy pilots in in the sea wolves they just flew with the freaking Hydro things just they would just like take it out they didn't want to hear about it like they're flying this thing the army pilots were like that so there was a lot of pilots that were just saying hey dude you know like whatever pretty much whatever

hey get it fixed later and but they had this this attentiveness to details that was Nope hydrogen. We got a hydrogen. We got something wrong with their blade. We got to land and they left and all of a sudden now they're short on aircraft It's one of the things that led to it was we didn't have these kind of Combat experience pilots like if that would have been a sea wolf pilot bro this guy would have been like what So just like anything else you if you go overboard with the small things you're gonna miss some big things including executing a mission. Yeah, what's cool about understanding how important the small things are rather than overlooking them is that actually gives you some insight about what you can and can't tolerate. Meaning if I don't pay attention to any of the little things because I'm a big picture guy and I don't care, there are some little things

that are going to kill me and I might not know about it. But if I'm sort of obsessive about knowing all those things, what it actually gives me in an airplane and really in anything, it gives me an understanding of that, that little thing, that is a little thing. We're going to ignore that and we're going to press. Or that little thing, it's fine now, but if it leads to this and this, then we got a problem that could get worse, or that little thing will get us killed. You got to know what those little things are

and know whether to ignore them, pay attention to them, or respond to them. And those are three different kind of key criteria, but if you don't know what those things are, you can't make those smart decisions. So you've got to know those things. You don't have to react to all of them, but you've got to know them.

How long did it take to study to get your certification? And how, like, did you have to put in some work? Oh, yeah. I mean, it did the whole thing. That was a several-month thing, and I had a blast doing it because it was a great way to get to know my Marines. And really, for me, more than anything, it was to get to know what the challenges were. And why it was a big deal for me is we were getting ready to go in a carrier. And they called them brown shirts.

They were brown jerseys on the carrier. Those are your plane captains. Those are your crew chiefs. And they have the most unappreciated, unforgiving job. They're the ones out there at 2 o'clock in the morning trying to fix an engine hanging over the side. of an aircraft carrier so that jet is on the flight schedule the next day, really underappreciated the amount of work and how important that work was. And I wanted to understand that so I could help advocate to get them the things that needed to be successful. And the only way to do that is to know

what they were going through. So I went through the entire process to get certified to learn about that. It also was a great way to get to know the Marines extremely well. But being a brown shirt, being a crew chief of a plane captain on a carrier, man, those young kids are putting in just the most ridiculous hours doing the hardest job in the world with almost no thanks, no appreciation at all because what they need is to get a jet to make the flight schedule. And then, you know, Dave Burke manned up the jet and gets all the glory because he launches off the carrier. He goes out for a 45 minute air conditioned flight. Totally. Comes back, lands it, turns the keys over and say, here's my rental. Yeah. I mean,

that's the joke. It's like, hey, I took the jet. I come back and I go, hey, this thing's And I get in the keys and I leave. And obviously I didn't want to be one of those pilots. And those pilots exist. Those pilots exist. Yeah. Yeah. Right now, just so you know, there are thousands of power line Marines listening to this

conversation that are stoked that you're talking about. How many parts? Do you know how many parts are in an F-18? I couldn't even guess. Do they have to know every individual system? Or do they just know... In the engine? The engine, yes.

I mean, we're talking. every single thing in an engine from the front of the back. Now you have airframes, you have electric, you have hydraulic, you have other major subsystems that these plane captains have a general understanding of, but nowhere near the detail. But when it comes to the engine, every single thing. And I'm sure it's true for all of them, but a Hornet engine is a complex piece of machinery.

So from a leadership perspective, if you strive to do the small things, if you strive to do the small things, well, it's going to help you. You can't become obsessed with them. We have to be careful of that. That becomes OCD, right? You will work for an OCD person? Yes.

I work for an OCD seal. And it was, you know, we work through it. But it's, it's just like any other sort of like mental health issue where the person just doesn't understand that they've got it. You know, and you're like, sir, do you really want? Yeah. You know, we, we, I can't. We, we, we, you know, whatever, whatever the case may be, whether it was. Oh, the fonts need to, you get those fonts straight and out or, you know, the drying cage needs to look like just whatever the thing is, then they're losing their minds about it and it's not healthy. And you can't convince them of otherwise. It's hard to even address it with them because they just look at you like you're crazy. So don't be that person. Yes, do the small things. Well, yes, pay attention, but don't get obsessed with them because then you won't be paying attention to the things that you need to pay attention to. So that's number one.

All right, next one. Colonel Glover Johns, to be a doer and a self-starter. Actually, let me rephrase that. He actually says, be a doer and a self-starter. Aggressiveness and initiatives, an initiative are two most admired qualities in a leader. But he throws the dichotomy in there, but you must also put your feet up and think.

This is interesting on 97 different levels, all right? So we're talking about being default aggressive. And this is something that clearly he's talking about it as well. And clearly as a human, you've got to make things happen. And talking and planning and dreaming and all that stuff doesn't matter. It actually doesn't matter. What matters is taking action, making things happen. That's what's going to be good.

And the Marine Corps has an awesome mentality. And they want their leaders to have a bias for action, which is exactly what is being said here. Being a doer and being a self-starter, that means having a bias for action. Your general move is I'm going to take action. That's what the Marine Corps wants their Marines to have. It's a bias for action.

Now, when I was teaching young seals, I told them they needed to be default aggressive, which is a little stronger. It's actually probably quite a bit stronger than a bias fraction. Right. Bias for action is like, okay, yep, I'm going to, yep, if I'm going to make a decision, I'm going to take action.

Okay, cool. I needed guys to be aggressive, make things happen. And the reason is because the situations I was putting these young seals in was it needed more than just a bias for action to get them going in the right direction. They needed to actually be like,

oh, I'm not doing anything. Bad things are happening. I need to get aggressive right now. So that's where that comes from. And like I said, if you're a person in life and you find yourself hesitating, you might need to program yourself to have a default aggressive attitude, not just a bias for action and not just, well, I'm going to be a doer. Even be a doer is pretty soft. That's not going to push you through some mayhem

where things are blowing up and you're like, I'm not sure what I should do. I'm just going to sit here and wait to see what happens. No, need to go. Now he says this, but you also must put your feet up and think. This is the most interesting, well, I guess one of the most interesting descriptions of detachment that I've heard. And what a good one. Let's face it. There's no possible way you can literally put your feet up and think unless you, unless you detach. So he's saying you got to do more than just, you know, think. You got to put your feet up and think. And he's saying that for a reason. He's saying that because, well, I guess I'm assuming he's saying that. Because he's told plenty of guys, hey, you need to think about what's happening.

And they're like, and they still make a bad decision. You know, they're just like brain imploding. He's saying, hey, take a step back. Look, sit out. There's all this chaos going on. Cool. Put your feet up and think. That's what I need you to do.

Thinking of the literal sense of that, too. And you once described talking about the idea of detachment of when you said you're writing, when you write things down. It's a good one. It's a literal form of detachment. Yep. And I'm thinking of, especially like if you're a soldier, it's really hard to do anything when your feet are up, literally.

Like, and I have this picture of this person who's at a desk is feeter up on the desk. And you actually can't do or go or move anywhere when your feet are up. And even just the stark contrasting your mind of what he means by that, which isn't just to stop and think. It's actually put yourself in a position where you're not doing anything while you're thinking. And then, of course, the dichotomy inside there. And I just can't help but imagine the idea that, he understands that, and I think you did too in Task Unit Bruiser is when you start correlating

a little bit of risk of not doing something, it's not like, hey, we get a little behind on the project or we get a, we'll finish it Monday instead of Friday or we get a little over budget. If you don't get this thing done in combat, the risk of that is astonishing. And when you understand the natural human bias is not to do those things, sometimes pushing to the default aggressive is actually where you have to go to get them to get away from that natural state, which is to do nothing. Yeah, I think I've got this somewhere else in this, in the, in the, in my notes here, but the power curve, which is a real thing in life.

I know it's a real thing in the air, but we used to use that term that, oh, you don't get behind the power curve. That means all the stuff that you have to get done, you get behind the power curve and you're done. You can't catch up again. That's right. So that's what happens in an aircraft, right? How does it work? So yeah, the power curve in an aircraft is a place.

Literally, it's a curve that they draw and it's based on like factors like thrust and lift is if you get behind the power curve, it requires more power than you have than you have, which again, in that literal sense. And the curve is like once you get past that curve, you know, I think the thing is like more power to go slower. Like you don't have the power or the thrust to keep the aircraft doing what it's doing. And if you get behind the power curve, it is an unrecoverable thing. And you know, unless you do some other things and give up some other things, which you don't want to do. Well, if you're at altitude, you can put nose down. You can regain your speed. Yes. That's what I would usually do. Yes. That's what you're doing. But to your point, like there's you can if you do with these other things, you don't have to get there. Yeah, there was a stoner was getting in or he's talking to some like command historian or something like this and He told this command historian and the command historian showed it to me

He was he said something along lines. Yeah, well in Ramadi Jocko had to beat his head against the wall to get a mission done It was like every every mission to make a mission happen. There was like so much stuff that you had to do to get it to go And that's what it feels like when you talk about oh These little things like this little document that you got to get put out this you got to run to this brief you got to go talk to this person there's All these things that have to take place. And not to mention the weapons have to be prep. The vehicles need to be ready.

The plan has to make all those things are going on. And if you fall back behind that power curve, you're just not going to do it. You're not going to happen. You have to be just full thrust. You have to just keep it there. And sure, after the op, you can be like, okay, I'm going to back off a little bit and save a little bit of gas right now. But it's not going to take more than a couple hours before you better put that. better put that throttle fully down again you better start making things happen

because they're not going to happen on their own um so that's good be a doer be a self-starter be aggressive take initiative but just straight up put your feet up and think about what you're doing so there you go that's number two number three strive for self-improvement through constant self-evaluation Strive for self-improvement through constant self-evaluation. This is a good rule for leadership and life. And it's weird to think that, number one, if you're not humble, you're not doing this, right? If you think you're doing everything right, you're not doing this.

It just isn't happening. You have to be looking, you have to be humble enough to say, what can I do better? And you have to start off by knowing where you are. And then trying to assess. what you can get what you can get better at and this is a difficult thing to do you know this is this is you know to me this is the eminently qualified human you know the the the actual evaluation of yourself which you and I wrote that book to the code the evaluation of protocol and then made the the app there's an app for it but that's the kind of thing where you go okay I know where I'm at right now

I know what I need to do today I know where I slacked off a little bit I know where I can improve tomorrow and if you're not doing that that's why that's how Rome fell apart right Rome wasn't built in the day and it didn't fall apart in a day either fall apart a little bit at a time just a little bit at a time that's what happens that self the self-evaluation comment and obviously immediately tethered that to the idea of humility is such an important piece of that because and I would see this all the time is I would work with guys that were good at certain things and not good at other things. And where they would spend their focus

would be doing the things they did well, which is important. And this is not to say that if you don't have a particular strength, that you shouldn't focus on that strength. But because they were comfortable doing the things they were good at, they spent all their time doing the things they were good at.

And you got more experience and more senior, the more of those other gaps became a big hindrance because you have to be good at a lot of things, especially in a leadership role, especially if you plan on elevating in that leadership role, the awareness of, hey, if I'm not good at this,

I have to spend time doing the things and getting better the things I'm not as good at as I should be. And how easy it is to go, well, I'm pretty good at this. I'm just going to stay over here because this is so much easier for me and not being willing to acknowledge what you're not good at

and actually spend some time working on that. And how easy it is to fall on the trap of, well, I'm good at this, I suck at this. Which one should I be working on today? I'll just keep doing this thing over here. and that self, the self-evaluation of what do I know I'm not good at and how easily we can just ignore what we know we need to be working on. I used to hate being on the bottom in jiu-jitsu,

like someone on top, it would just like smash and I would hate the feeling, right? And so for months, the only place I started was with people across the side or mounted on me. I was just, go ahead, take it. And then just got over it, got over it completely, where it literally didn't matter anymore. If you don't have that approach,

you're going to have problems, man. I'm gonna have problems. Watch out for that. And this is tied into the next one number four, which is never be satisfied. Ask of any project, how can it be done better? Now, listen,

you know, you could, just to throw like a different perspective on this or a different angle, the never be satisfied thing where all of a sudden, you know, I'm never satisfied

and I'm, you know, freaking out about and constantly, there's people that, that run into issues with that where they can't. like chill out and back off and detach and look around and see what's happening. So never is kind of a strong word.

But at the same time, this is completely tied to humility because if you are satisfied, that's an indicator that maybe you think you're there. And you're not. You're not. This implies the debrief to me. You know, it's like not not being satisfied with it by looking. back at it and saying, hey, how could we do this better? Did we miss anything? Or is there something we should add to this? And then debriefing it and then trying to, you know, trying to get on the next

evolution. Yeah, 100%. If you're not debriefing what you're doing. And look, if you want to take that to a really good personal level, if you look at your day, that's what's nice about the EQH app. It's like, if you look at your day and you're like, oh, I could have done this better. Just at the end of the day going, Hmm, did I really, I didn't really do that. I got in on that donut or whatever, tapped in. My daughters right now, they say tapped into, like, if they're talking about food, you're like, oh, can I tap into that? So you might have accidentally tapped into a donut or whatever, right?

We're going to watch out. So, which, by the way, I don't think I can ever eat a donut again because I've talked to someone smack about donuts. And I think there's someone with like a 600 millimeter lens stalking me waiting to see that donut, go down that. Ain't happening, but doing a debrief with yourself at the end of the day. What did I and then and then also creating what you're gonna do tomorrow to focus on the weaknesses a little bit and again like you said Dave Dave wasn't like hey, you know I'm gonna focus on my piano skills because he's not that great at piano when he's supposed to be a jet fighter pilot right right? I get it But doesn't mean you shouldn't understand music or something. You know what I'm saying doesn't mean you shouldn't go out and get that get box. Oh

All right. Number five, don't over-inspect or oversupervised. Allow your leaders to make mistakes in training so they can profit from their errors and not make them in combat. So decentralized command, clearly, is what we're talking about here. And it's incredible how annoying over-inspection and over-supervision is to humans. That's psychological reactants, right? It's like a psychological reactance, which means we don't want to be told what to do because we're human beings. We have a psychological rejection of people that are trying to control us.

That's normal. That's common. But over-inspection and over-supervision just triggers the psychological reactants all day long. All day long. Don't let it happen. Don't be that leader because that's not going to work out good for you. Your team's not going to like it. No one's going to like it.

Now, here's where people get a little bit wary about this, because they think, well, you know, I'm in the business world. And so I don't have the luxury of being able to train someone to, in a training situation. No, they got to go in front of a client. I can't just let them fail in training because there's no such thing. We don't do that. We don't have time. I don't have six months getting ready to go on deployment and work with the client.

No, we're working the client today. So there are multiple ways of doing this, right? If Dave has got to, Dave's not experienced in a certain type of project. And I go, okay, Dave, you're going to take lead on this project. Why don't you come up with, you know, your initial brief on the timeline you want to use? And he puts together the timeline. I don't send him to the client with it. I say, okay, now brief me on it.

And he's like, I got 38 days to talk about cover and move. And I go, no, that doesn't make me sense. So you can actually train and educate someone just by putting in a little probably 20% extra effort. And if you think about it, it's actually probably a break even because I didn't have to do the, of the work myself. I just said, hey, Dave, come up with a timeline for this training schedule for this client. And he goes, oh, cool. And he goes and does it. Now, if I would have had to do it, I would have made couple phone calls and I would have to pull out the word processor and I would have to sit down and do it. And it would have been a pain. And plus I would have been in the weeds

on it. So I don't really see as much. I'm not detached from it. Instead, I go, hey, Dave, come up with a timeline for this client, what you want to do for a basic schedule. And he goes, cool, got it. He does it. He's never done it before or maybe he just, I go, here's an old client, similar client you can use this as a as a as a guide cool he does it it's pretty close right it doesn't I'm not wasting a bunch of time and if he was a total idiot and you produce something that sucked I'd be like okay cool this is what this is horrible this is why didn't cost us anything didn't put any risk didn't show the client some bad take on us no it's all good so just because we use that just because the term

is used here make mistakes in training don't consider training to be the this official thing where you've been pulled away and you don't have any interaction in the real world. No, training can happen every single day with everything that you do. And that's what you should do. And you should let people brush up against the guardrails of failure. You should let people do that. And then when they do, you don't jump down their throat. And now you don't become a micromanager.

You let you make adjustments and you set another thing for them. Say, all right, here's, hey, Dave, this doesn't make any sense. Adjust this late. This will never take this much time. Go make some adjustments. Bring it back to me. Dave, does it? Hey, cool.

Yep, good to go. my net investment of time is probably the same. If not, I'm probably saving time. And my product, my end product is actually better because I'm detached and I wasn't in the weeds on the initial assignment. So don't over-inspect. Don't over-supervise. Hard to do that.

Your ego wants you to oversupervised, by the way. Your ego wants to over-inspect. Your ego actually wants to find problems. You ever had those bosses? Like in the SEAL teams, you can't get through a, like in the SEAL teams, you know, you You give a brief, there's no way you're getting through the brief without getting dinged on seven different things. I'd like some of the guys I used to critique their briefs on come and talk to me. Because I was freaking harsh on those briefs.

But here's the thing, man. I'll have to review some of my notes because I would be harsh because they would do dumb shit. And I'd be like, bro, what are you doing over here? What does this mean? I can't even understand. Look at your pictures here. Like, this doesn't make any sense. What is this timeline?

How do you think you're going to patrol from here to that amount of time? They were just legitimate things because I actually didn't care. I actually didn't care what the font was. I didn't care about any of that. I cared about and actually I did, here's a good case and point. I had a guy, good dude, tore his brief up and you know he gets done. They do another brief next day, next stop, tore it up, terrible. And he's like, after the first day he added even more like trying to satisfy me.

And he says, dude, What this is like a moving target? What is that you're actually want from these briefs? And I said, well, it's not a moving target. I said, to me, a good brief is when you give a brief, your men understand the mission and the execution. And he was like, okay, fair enough. And then he took that to heart of, okay, my audience is not Jocko,

my audience is not the commanding officer, my audience is my machine gunner, My audience is my point, man. My audience is my breacher. That's my audience. That's who needs to understand this thing. And that's the way it's supposed to be. And that's the same thing Laif and I wrote about.

That's happened with Laf and Seth. Laif and Seth, we're doing the freaking most insane 150 slide PowerPoint briefs for reconnaissance missions and training. And they were so bad. And I was like, hey, guys, no one knows what the hell you guys are talking about. I said, let's do this. I said, I just want you to brief to the lowest, the denominator in your new platoon just do that pull out a map don't need to put a bunch of slides

they don't need to have animation in the slides you know much time it takes to do animation in the slide i mean it's a total waste of time it's a total waste of time you should pull up the map and be like hey we're going to move from here to here that's the way it's going to work follow my finger follow my pointer on this map so you all know what's up instead we spend an extra hour and 22 minutes making Humvees drive down a route in an animated way it's a it's a disaster man and the cool thing was and props to my commanding officer those guys and and you guys have heard the story like Seth was like we're gonna get fired and I said hey there you will not get fired if anyone gets fired I will say this was a hundred

percent on me I told them brief this way don't worry about it brief to your lowest common denominator brief to your machine gunners and they're like okay and sure enough the commanding officer came up he sat through the brief and to his credit he was like that was the those are the best briefs we've had I actually understand what's happening I'm like that's the goal so that's what we need to do don't over-supervised don't over-inspect and when people make mistakes just make some little adjustments tell them what the goal is and we're going to be all right yeah I'm just cracking out listening you tell these stories and just kind of putting my version of that and my

experience, but I think also in a leadership role, it doesn't matter if you're in the military, doesn't matter if you're in the private sector and whether you're training a real world, you also have to know what matters. You got to know what really matters and what really doesn't. And something we saw in the military that I know transfers over would drive people nuts is if you're in a key leadership role and you're getting this brief and you make a comment about the font, guess what? Those people all downstream you, they're going to obsess over the font. So if it really doesn't matter, don't say anything about it because what your people are really trying to do is make you happy. They're trying to give you what they think you want.

And if you're the guy that wants to think out loud, go, boy, you know, courier is way better than times, isn't it? Every single slide is now going to get reviewed three layers downstream of someone trying to make sure. Oh, Dave's real obsessive about the font. Even if you're not. But if you want to make a point of that, if you decide to bring that up, your people are going to try to satisfy you. That's what they're trying to do. So be real careful about what matters and don't talk about the things that don't matter because they're going to hear you and they're going to want to fix that when in your mind it isn't even an important thing. But once you say it, it's out there.

That's what people are going to. We saw that in the military all the times. Oh, this, we're briefing this general. He's real big on spacing. And I bet you if you grab that general, go, hey, general, we have to spend three hours fixing this spacing on this brief. Do you want us to do that? He would say no. Where did you even get that?

Yeah. But he made a comment or it came out. Yeah, and the worst thing is you've got people that are focused on that instead of focusing on a mission Totally and a good plan and contingency plans so so be careful that Number six keep the troops informed Telling them what how and why builds their confidence this was an interesting an interesting little twist on that right builds their confidence First of all, lets us know the importance of people being confident, being confident in the plan. And look, when you know what you're doing, but you don't know why, that's a problem for your confidence.

You don't even know why you're doing it. So you're just, I don't know. If you know why you're doing something, but you don't know what you're doing it for, that's the same thing. So keeping people informed, a lack of info, and this was one of the reasons why I was very happy. and I was very lucky in my career. I was very lucky in my career that I did my career the way I did. And I'm not saying that there's a bunch of better ways to do it because there certainly are. But for me, what was very nice for me, one of the huge lessons that I learned was how horrible it feels not to know what's happening.

And the team normally doesn't know what you think they know. They don't. You think they know stuff? They don't know it you think that they understand things they don't it's not because they're not stupid because they don't have the visibility on the things that you have the visibility on So it's it's very important to tell people what's going on and by the way And this is it's so crystal clear in the seal teams put it's crystal clear anywhere else but the seal teams was just So so so epic at doing this anything that the troops didn't know they were gonna make up their own freaking rumor and it was gonna be like the worst possible case scenario every single time

you know oh the we're heading back early oh we're heading back from this trip early you know you're probably going because the aircraft got rescheduled and so you're gonna head back early people are like oh no see our platoon's getting disband you know we've been whatever they just go wild so when you don't tell people what's going on they're going to make it up and that's going to be bad and it And one of the worst feelings in the world is to not know what's happening in as part of a team. And look, this doesn't mean you have to submit a 19 page PowerPoint brief, especially if you can get people the context and the context. You know, if every day or every couple days you're giving the context of people have the context. Now my brief doesn't have to be that long.

It's like, hey, Kerry, we're actually going to move to this position. You're like, okay, cool, because I know that here's where we were. Here's where we're going. If I just, you don't know, have any context and I tell you we're moving here, I have to actually take now 20 minutes to explain how we got to the point where we're going to go there. So keep that in mind. Number seven, the heart of the training, the more the troops will brag. The harder the training, the more the troops will brag. Clearly, this is seen in the military and almost to a detriment, of course, because people, you can put people through so much training and they can start to brag so much.

They start to believe it. Leif always talks about the fact when we started task unit bruiser and we're working together and we were going doing extra. We were coming in early in the morning. We were staying later at night. We were doing extra iterations of the training that we were being told to do. The training cadre would leave and we'd stay there and do more. And the initial take was like, what we're doing this?

That was the kind of initial take. And sure enough, as we got. better as we got more squared away as we started getting you know huge compliments from the training cadre all of a sudden that that bitching turned to bragging which was pretty which was pretty cool and it's the thing is though there's a speed bump that you have to get over right there's a speed bump there's a there's a point in time there's an intersection of time where you're working harder but you're not seeing any benefits from it you're working harder but no one really else can see it you're working hard you're doing extra but there's no real benefit

and you got to get that's a speed bump and so you're going to get people being negative this bill we're going to work extra we're going to be coming early well you're going to stay there that that is a thing that you're going to have to overcome and get to the point where all of a sudden oh we just crushed this block of training we just got huge you know compliments to our commanding officer about our performance in land warfare or whatever. And so you've got to get over that speed bump so that the bragging can start and the pride can start. And then what you've got to be careful of

is you've got to be careful that that pride doesn't get so big that people like, well, you know, we don't need to do anymore. We don't need to do this anymore. So keep that in mind and keep yourselves in check. You know, luckily we had friends in other task units because it got pretty, the brawage. All right, the kind of, the chest sticking out in TASCube Bruezer got a little bit much.

And, you know, we'd get, like, some of our friends and other TASC units would be like, you know, oh, BTF, you know, and we're like, okay, we need to back off a little. Hey, chill out with everybody, you know. So just keep it in check a little bit. But there's a speed bump. You gotta get over.

That's a real thing. Yeah, and I think there's a connection, too, to the previous comment you made about the why, is that that hard training, especially when they start to make the connection of why hard training is important, if they know why they're doing it, your people will have so much more resilience

and be able to tolerate so much more hard training. And if you're just out for just training hard because that's how you are and they can't make any connection to all this extra time, all this extra work, that it doesn't lead to something, you will run into a problem. But if you can connect that, why?

And then go, oh, this real world thing was so much easier now the willingness to work hard in practice or work hard in training or put in the extra time because they know why they're doing it makes it so much easier down the road. Yeah, no doubt. Like you said, going with the previous point, keep the troops informed.

If you're not informed the troops and you're just kicking the crap out of a normal normal basis, there's not going to be any pride. There's just going to be negativity. So be careful that. Number eight, enthusiasm, fairness, and moral and physical courage. four of the most important aspects of leadership.

Isn't an interesting enthusiasm? Out of the gate, enthusiasm. Man, you know why that is, in my opinion? Because that is so infectious to everybody else. And when you're enthusiastic about something, when someone on the team is enthusiastic, that can change the attitude of everyone on the team. If you as the leader enthusiastic,

it's definitely going to help. If you as the leader are not enthusiastic about something, it's a disaster and everyone's going to be bummed out to be doing whatever. Having a good time with stuff and being enthusiastic, and you know what's cool? You can fake that. You can fake that all day long.

I did. I'd be like, this is some dumb shit. Hey, let's rock and roll. Like, you know what I mean? You got to just sometimes call it, man. I'm going to be fired up for this. I'm going to take it to the next level. watch let's go and then you're just having fun and pretty much you you fool everyone else then

you fool yourself and you're having a good time let's do it let's rock and roll fairness clearly clearly got to be fair about what you're doing and then moral and physical courage you know what's what's interesting on these two i was thinking about it you would think that moral courage would be the easier thing to have because you're not under the threat of physical harm, right? Because normally I think physical courage, I think you're risking some sort of physical injury. But I think most of the time,

we see, I think we more often see a failure of moral courage than physical courage. Why is that? I think it basically boils down to most of the time with moral courage, you have time to think about it. And physical courage, you're like, oh, there's something going on. I need to get in there.

I'm going to go do this right now. And even talking to guys that have done, like, incredibly courageous thing. I remember Mike Thornton was on the podcast, Medal of Honor recipient, Vietnam, Seal. And I said, you know, were you scared when you were getting ready to, I forget what it was, when you were getting ready to run across this beach that's being, you know, just darted with machine gun fire and grab your buddy that you thought was dead? Were you scared? Did you hesitate? He's like, no, I didn't think about it all.

I just had to go. So can you have time to think about? You know, it's just like, that's what I'm doing, I'm doing it now and there's no time to think about it. Moral courage is like you have time to weigh out what's going to happen and what the consequences are going to be and what are people going to think and what are you going to think

and how is it going to feel? And I think that's why oftentimes the moral courage can be harder to muster up because you have time to think about it, which is generally not fun. And the team dynamic, You know, moral courage in a team, especially if there's like social proof against you, right? The rest of the team thinks one thing and you think, you know, you're being morally courageous.

And that's not what the team thinks. And that can put some pressure on you as an individual now against the team and your views versus theirs. That's a little different dynamic as opposed to moral courage as an individual. I'm going to do the right thing because that's the right thing to do. But you throw that in a team dynamic, it gets a little more difficult. Yeah, well, you better have and build really good relationships with people. That way, you don't get yourself into a predicament, right? The predicament that you get yourself into is, you know, Dave does something that's a little bit wrong,

but I don't really know him that well. And I'm like, well, you know, I don't really want to say anything. And then I basically now have said, hey, you're cool. That what you did is cool. And now he does something a little bit further outside the box of what he should be doing. And now I'm like, wait a second. Now this is going outside the box, but I still don't, can't say anything to Dave about it. I haven't preempted anything.

And now Dave goes further outside the box. So by the time I'm like going to say something, well, now I've known about the four things that he did that were outside the box. I'm culpable as well now. So now all of a sudden, I got to, it's going to be, I totally screwed myself. Whereas if I see Dave leaning outside the box and go, hey, Dave, hey, bro, what are you doing? What are you doing with this? He's like, well, you know, something we can get away. with and I go ah man would you really like that to be on the cover of you know the

newspaper he's like well yeah maybe not I mean and look I trust you and you trust me but what about this guy over here and that guy over there and they're all gonna know what's happening this doesn't seem like a smart move man so just having a it just like just like I always say about hard conversations that earlier you have that conversation the easier it's gonna be you know I that's something that Laif talks about you know I said there's no cover-ups in tasking a bruiser there's no cover-ups. They're not covering anything up. If something happens, we're going to tell everyone what happened. If, you know, if somebody gets shot, something, something goes down, there's no cover-ups.

This is what we're doing. And right there, everyone kind of goes, okay, like, I guess that's the way it's going to be. And there's no, there's no, you start stepping outside the box. And it's like, wait a second, I already told you this. So it makes the easy, it makes the hard conversation easier out of the gate because everybody kind of knows, oh, Zonko said there's no cover-ups. Okay, well, we know where he stands. Got it. And we won't try and, you know, push the envelope. And when we do push the envelope a little bit, we're getting, we're getting pushed back in there real quick.

So I think that will help you with your moral courage. Number one, having relationships with people. Number two, have the hard conversations earlier. Because that way you don't put yourself in that freaking terrible predicament. We're like, uh, Dave's embezzled freaking $380,000 from whatever. You know, you're like, bro, what are you doing? And it's too late because I knew about it, but now I'm culpable. So let's not get there.

Moral courage is easier earlier. Let people know where you stand. Number nine, showmanship, a vital technique of leadership. One of the things that isn't about face, I guess Colonel Glover Johns was like a crack shot. It's a super accurate shot and he would walk down the range and like let me see your rifle son and He'd say you got a quarter on you and he'd have him throw a quarter up in the air and he'd shoot the quarter and these were like prized possessions to have a quarter that was shot by glove John's these are the kind of things that he did So that's something that you know something that is good to be able to to

Show people that you got something I mean the seal team's being able to shoot move and communicate is a good thing You know you got to be a good shot you don't want to be a loser shot You know I was definitely never the best shot I was usually fast I was pretty fast out of the holster So I could do well in a speed shooting, but then you know you get out some The at my accuracy wouldn't be as good as like our really good shooters the guys were freaking really good But shoot move and communicate, you know are you in good shape can you do hey if you're lagging if you're in a leadership position You're lagging on a patrol like you You need your weight, you can't carry your weight, that's a problem, right?

That's a problem. If you don't know how to work your radio, that's a problem. These are just like little things, right? And honestly, Jiu-Jitsu is pretty good little showmanship thing. You know, you want to roll? Hey, it's kind of an issue to work with, you know? And I've, I've, man, when I talk about, I was on the academy the other day and I brought this up.

I brought this up, this idea of showmanship and when to actually say, let me show my boss how good my team is. Like sometimes you got to do things like that. And it's very counter to what I say 99% of the time, which is, hey, you work hard. Don't worry about the result. Don't worry about who sees it. But sometimes all of a sudden you're thinking, well, if the boss can't see what we're doing, we're not going to get these extra funds.

We're not get this extra personnel. How do I set this up? so my boss can actually see so I can take care of the team better. So there are times when showmanship is going to play a role in you being able to take care of your team better. That happens. How much showmanship did you do flying an F-18 at the Top Gun School?

Yeah. I mean, I think that ability to be a little bit of a showman is, I mean, it's important a bunch of ways. You were just talking a minute ago. You're talking about enthusiasm, and you're like, hey, what's cool about that as you can fake it. And that even there's a little bit of showmanship of you were going to present yourself

as if the situation that we're in, no matter what it is, it's totally awesome. This is going to be a blast. We're going to whatever. And it's really not that hard to even pretend to be interested in something as opposed to walking in like, okay, here we go. And how instantaneously you can set the tone. And if you in the back of your mind recognize that part of being a showman is the people are going to follow, they're going to, they're going to reflect that back to you.

They're going to guide off your behavior. Whatever you show them, they're going to show them back, that showmanship of how your attitude is going to be towards anything and how quickly you can come into your half your team's attitude just by showing that this is going to be fun or a good time. And even if they know you're faking it, they get on board. The idea that you have to kind of play the game a little bit and sort of act a little bit in a leadership role and how easy it is to do that. It's such an overlooked thing. Yeah, and as you were saying that I broke something down and I realized something about myself that is a

tactic technique and procedure that's probably very important and it's something that I've probably done my whole career. I'm not going to rely on being a good actor I'm not going to be re even rely on faking it. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna figure out in my own head how this makes sense how how this makes sense for me to be able to do what I'm going to do to the nth degree like I can tell you here's one when I was going to college I didn't want to work I didn't want to read this book and write this paper do this all the stupid stuff I turned it into a competition in my head against the teacher I was fighting against the teacher I wanted to know more than teachers I made that in my

head where I was like oh I'm gonna crush this teacher they're not they're not gonna ask me one question that I don't know the answer to that's not happening and so I turned in a competition in my head that was fun but I do the same thing like if my platoon got tasked with doing something stupid I'd be like oh guess what I'd turn it into a game my head that I really did want to win and I really wanted a platoon to win so I'd be like oh guess what we got tasked with doing this stupid hydrographic reconnaissance we're gonna take it so seriously that the that the command is gonna be like oh my god we're gonna leave an impression on them

from doing a hydrographic reconnaissance that they're gonna think we're the most squared away guys ever watch this and all of a sudden Instead of a I would truly believe that. I would try be like hell yeah. So I think that was my tactic and my technique was to truly find what was good about some situation and completely focus on that 100% because then then I'm not trying to because you know I always say you can smell you can smell uh intent has a smell right so if I'm like well this is a stupid hydrographic reconnaissance but I'm gonna pretend like it's good guys are gonna smell that But if I go, hey, they're making us do a hydro, we're going to blow their minds when they get this chart that we give them.

And we're going to give it to them. All of a sudden, I was like, hey, yeah, yeah. Like, they're going to want to test everyone else. They're going to give all the other hydros to the other platoons because they're going to know we know what's up. Our goal is to make us never get tasked with a hydro again because they see that we know how to do it so well. Boom. And all of a sudden, everyone's amped up. And that's what I did probably more than anything else.

I remember I did that at an officer candidate school at officer candidate school You have to follow all these rules and one of them is speaking in a ballistic tone which means you have to yell everything and how would just I told my whole class I'm like when you because you had to do it to the senior the class is above you the senior classes You had to you were supposed to talk in a ballistic tone to them and I said and it was kind of annoying and I said you should be so loud We're gonna be so loud that it's gonna annoy them That was it also just like you can see Carrie's smiling, you're smiling, like that all of a sudden became fun. We were trying to be so loud when we were talking to the senior classmen that it was annoying. It wasn't annoying to us.

It was annoying to them. And that's exactly what we did. As a matter of fact, one time we were all lined up to buy, they would sell us candy bars, right? And so my class is lined up with the senior classes selling us coax and candy bars to make money so they can make a t-shirt or something like this. And you, and they're selling from this little closet thing. And I had, I said, Hey, when you guys go in there, you go ballistic. And so sure enough, there's 50 or 60 people in my class by the 25th person. The upper classman like steps out in the hallway, attention candidates. When you get in this office, you are not to sound off in a ballistic tone.

And what did I do? I stepped out. I was like, you know, officer candidate willing request permission to speak. Like what? I'm like, you know, according to the freaking rulebook. 7-9 we are supposed to maintain ballistic tone at all times and they they cowered to it they were like fine and so we just went in there and screamed her head off game all headaches so I'm gonna take something like that we'll find a way to make this fun and good and I think that might be a more

reliable tool than my acting ability which I can't really count on yeah and it's It's not even that hard. You even set it inside there. You're like, watch this. That's showmanship. It's like, hey, you want to give me that thing? Watch this. And, yeah, I think, you know, obviously the semantics of the words you want to be careful

with that. You don't want to fake anything in terms of, hey, I don't really believe this, but I'm going to do it. You've got to find the truth that's inside there. But if there's something, it's just like, hey, we're going to do this thing. Watch this. And how quickly people rally around that and get on board and it gets done. It's good to go and you move on. And it's not that big of a deal.

Hell, when I was going through buds in third phase, I would, me and my swim buddy would voluntarily get wet and sandy. And eventually, they, you know, the instructions, why are you getting wet and sandy? We'd be like, to get harder, to be harder. And they didn't want us to get wet and sandy on like the electric blasting range. So you're doing demolition on a range. And they want you to be dry and stuff.

And we, they ended up securing our class saying, you guys are not allowed to get wet in sandy. And then we got wet and sandian slept outside and they were like, what are you doing? And they're like just trying to get harder. So a little psychological game. We're going to have fun with this. That's what we're doing. Rock and roll. Showmanship. Keep it in mind. Number 10. The ability to speak and write well to essential tools of leadership. Here's the thing that I think people underestimate. You get better at both these things. And a matter of fact, you can get insanely better. at both these things writing for sure a one tip out of the gate if you're not much of a writer right now write and then read what you wrote aloud and see what it sounds like and you're gonna see that you suck you suck at writing when you write something and you read it out and you this sounds awful yep that's a great first indicator

and the more you practice and then find somebody to read it for you and critique it and you will get better at writing you will become more clear you'll become more concise you'll become a better writer over time and that will that will reflect in the way that you speak as well and also the more you speak to groups the more you speak aloud that's one of the reasons why they had you do that OCS that's why you had to yell everything because they wanted you to get confident in your voice and get confident in thinking and speaking quickly and the way the drill instructor told us he said you know you young officers are going to be on the bridge of a vessel of a warship and it's going to be going on the wrong direction and you need to confidently say hey we need

to shift course right now you can't you can't be shy about it when you speak so those are things that you can definitely get better at your ability to speak and write well and look you're going to have some natural capability some people are more articulate and good at speaking and public speaking just naturally. They're just naturally good at it. Just like some people have good hand-eye coordination. Some people have a good singing voice. Some people can write well. Some people can are better at writing out of the gate than some other people. It's just the way it is. But you don't have to accept that that's where you need to be and that's where you're going to stay. You don't have to. You can truly get better at both of these things. And these are essential tools of leadership. Essential tools of leadership. And really if you think about it, that's what leadership actually boils down to is you're trying to get other, humans to understand what you're saying. That's that's what you're doing. So if you can't articulate things well in both spoken word and written word, you're going to have problems.

Did they train you guys actually in the Marine Corps to speak? Or was it just OJT because you're briefing this and you're briefing that? Yeah, my recollection for up until like top gun level stuff, they weren't giving you explicit stuff on speaking, but there was a lot of work on on writing. And you know, in the writing there was, I think they called it, was it like a standard naval letter format. There was like a technique of how to do that. And there was a book or a publication or like a guide on how to do that.

And, you know, that wasn't like the most, you know, creative or unique way to do it. But there was a technique to that, especially if you were trying to run some paperwork up to get an approval of something. There was a way to do it. And there was a lot of teaching on that. The natural tendency thing that you spoke to made me think. of something is it was really obvious, especially early in the career, the people that had, the speaking part specifically, the ones that were just naturally good speakers. And how drawing you were to those guys. You'd look at them like, damn, that was a really good brief. I don't even

remember exactly what he's saying, but he said it really well. And how powerful that capacity is. And to your point that if you weren't good at it, if you're not careful, you'll convince yourself that, oh, I'm just not good at this. But, dude, you could get good at speaking by just practicing and role playing, rehearsing and listening to yourself, and how important, how important it is to sound good when you're talking. And look, if you got that natural capacity, that's awesome. Congrats. That's a good thing for you.

It's going to help you. But if you don't have that, you can improve on that, like, quickly if you spend some time on it. Somebody sent me a clip the other day. It was one of my old bosses, and he was getting interviewed. And he was like, you know, the guy says, oh, you know, did you ever work with Jaco? And he's like, yeah, he worked for me. for whatever, 18 months. And he goes, oh, do you have any good stories about Jock?

Like, what was he like? And he goes, he was the thing. He was the thing that I'm gonna tell you and this is probably gonna let you down. The thing that I'll tell you about Jocka was that he was a really, really excellent writer. And I was like, okay, that's cool. Fair enough.

There's something that you can go to in the Navy. It's called Master Training Specialist and it's where you learn to kind of become an instructor and they used to send Bud's instructors to that school. And I had friends that went to and they would have to brief, you know, they'd have to teach something to a class.

I never went to that school. I think that's the closest that you could get to some kind of a formal training for speaking in the Navy, or at least in the SEAL teams. Maybe there's more, I don't know. And speaking of I don't know, if you're speaking, try and speak about things that you know about. And if you don't know about them,

you say, I don't know. This is one of the biggest, ways to level up in your speaking ability is when someone says, hey, Jocko, can you explain the flux capacitor on this engine? I go, actually, I'm not familiar with flux capacitors. You'll have to check with Dave Burke on that one. Right. And just knowing that I can say that about any subject that I don't understand well enough is such a liberating feeling. And oftentimes people think, Well, if I'm standing up in front, I better know the answer. You don't need to know the answer to anything.

You're a human being. You're not a computer. And by the way, whatever needs to be found out can be Googled and figured out really quickly. So you don't need to say, hey, that's an interesting question. Why don't you Google it and get back to me with the answer, right? There's no reason to think you have to know the answer to everything. You don't. So let that be the first thing to level you up.

I'm quite frankly, now that I think about it, I got taught this when I was when I was, was getting ready to do my trident review board to see if I was going to get my trident the Master Chief was like if you don't know something say you don't know it don't try and bullshit us we'll smash you and you're like okay fair enough and that's a great lesson to learn in life everyone can see through it so speaking writing practice them you'll get better speaking of speaking in writing this is an interesting one number 11 there is a salient difference between profanity and obscenity while the leader employs profanity tempered with discretion he never uses obscenities we're talking about some

semantics and splitting some hairs hair so from the dictionary profanity is blasphemous or obscene language or a square word so it's the word whereas obscenity is the state or quality of being obscene obscene behavior, language, images, and extremely offensive word or expression. So they're definitely a bunch of crossover there. That was like the dictionary definition. The FCC, the Federal Communications,

what was it, Federal Communications Commission maybe? They had obscene content is not protected by the First Amendment. And it's by obscene content is never allowed on FCC programming. It's not allowed. There's a three-pronged test. So number one is it appeals to an average person's sexual interest.

So that alone can make it obscene. Depict or describe sexual contact in a patently offensive way. And the key point here is lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. So that's what obscene means, according to the FCC. Profane, and this is something that can make it on the FCC sometimes, grossly offensive language that is considered a public nuisance. So you could say a swear word as long as you weren't using the context of something offensive. And the way I guess the way I tried to simplify this for myself is that using profane words sometimes is okay, but not using them. in the actual context that the word means.

I think I got it. I'm not 100% sure. We did a whole freaking podcast, like one of the earliest podcasts we did was about swearing. And yeah, so my opinion on swearing is there is, look, if you're swearing all the time, hey, if you're swearing all the time

and you're in the locker room, you're at the team area, you're with your buddies, whatever, not that big of a deal, of course. You start, Standing up in front of a group of a team that you're leading and you're swearing a bunch isn't it's not gonna work. It's not gonna help it's not gonna it's it doesn't come across well and if you develop your vocabulary Hopefully you won't need to swear and if you're swearing all the time when the time comes where you do need to swear it's not powerful So that's that's what I'll stick with. I don't know Dave any opinion on that one? Yeah, I mean I think

I'm kind of contemplating what I remember people, how often people swore in the military. You know? And so when I got up to Topka, I'm like, there's no swearing up there. And what they really, really wanted to impress on you was they wanted you to be professional.

And it's really kind of hard to make the connection between just, you know, swear words and professionalism. But I think as I'm thinking, I'm hearing you talking, I'm actually thinking about a little bit of, of the logic behind that. I think something you said was kind of really important was there was this idea, and listen,

I was up there like predated like social media, predated phones that had cameras, like it, but there was this idea that you are always being watched. And what they were trying to impress upon you is that when you wear a Top Gun Patch and you're in a squadron space, whether you're an instructor or former instructor, that patch is gonna draw attention to you.

I bet it's very much like a Trident. You see someone with a Trident, and look, you're gonna immediately get some cred. I don't care who you're, you're going to get looked at. And they're going to kind of be like, all right, let's, what's this guy all about? And if you have a Trident, I imagine, in the Navy, in the military service, that symbol has meaning.

And what they wanted to impress upon us is that you are going to be judged at a higher standard, a higher level than you have ever been because that patch that you had. And they wanted to impress upon you the need to be a professional as often as you can. And I think the point you made is when, for whatever reason, I chose to use a profanity, it had much more impact than my old methodology, which I was, you know, pre-professional was like, just in the squadron space, just I don't even know how often I swore. Going on. So I think that idea that you were being judged to a particular standard. And that's true.

Listen, what you want from your people in your organization, they want to feel the obligation to represent that organization. well, your team, your company, that image, whatever it might be. And you can't do that well if every other word is just some F-bomb because you don't know how to communicate in another way. So I think the way you described it is really good, the nuance of that. And also the idea that you are representing something that is important. And if you don't know how to communicate without using those words, you're not going to represent the community or that your team very well at all. Yeah. I, when my kids were little, I never swore in front of my kids, never swore in of my wife or very seldom and then I brought my full I brought my son out to to a to a

true you know I would bring him out sometimes to training you know when he was little and he was at that age where you know maybe he maybe he he knew like he knew swears right you're hearing him at school and it's like oh my gosh so he knew swears but he never heard me saying the first time you heard me debrief like a full tune you could see his eyes like just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and you He was like amazed. It was like a totally different scenario. I got asked at the last monster.

I forget the context of the question, but the question was basically, what does professionalism mean to you? And I was talking to Jason and Steve about it. They were backstage and I got this question. They were kind of like looking at each other. And they were like, well, it was hair, uniforms being on time.

And I'm like thinking about it. And then I say, professionalism to me is you put the mission above yourself. And then, They were like, oh, that's a good answer because, look, why do you have a crappy uniform? Because you care more about your own time. Why do you show up late? Oh, it's because you care more about yourself than you do about the mission.

Why is your haircut out of regs? Oh, it's because you don't care about it. It's like, it's a concise way of saying that. And that's the same thing here. Like if you're going to act professional and you're just dropping F bombs the whole time, you know, who's, recording you who's listening to you how does that sound and is it appropriate for all audience is it appropriate sometimes to swear hell yes yes it is and you get into a platoon and you're trying to make them understand something it's going to be cleared hot but next thing you know and that's

what's interesting about the seal teams next thing you're briefing whatever some civilians about something and you just have to be professional so there you go next one number 12 have consideration for others. Isn't this an amazing statement? It's such a big blanket statement. Subordinates, superiors, friends, foes, have consideration for others. And if you want to really, if you want to, if I can apply some jaco stretch semantics to this, consideration is also let me understand what their perspective is.

Let me understand how this is going to make them feel. Let me understand how this is going to impact someone else. and that's just that's simple have consideration for others up and down the chain of command across the chain of command competitors allies have consideration this is one of those things that i see right away when there's a lack of it you know and it i don't get bothered by a ton of stuff but lack of consideration is one of those things that just it gets to me a little bit you know it's like how how you know got that pet peeve going on over there. It's just how do you not see it? You know, how are you not aware that that there's just a total lack of consideration and the impact? Do you want to answer that question?

Please. Yeah, the answer to that question is, I'm more important than you. So I'll show up late and you'll wait on me. And I won't bring the right gear and I can borrow yours. And I, whatever the case may be, that's all just me thinking I'm cooler and you don't really, you don't really matter as much as I do. I think that's where a true lack of consideration for others is the only thing I consider it is myself right bad move as a leader uh number 13 yelling detracts from your dignity take men aside to counsel them straightforward again um I think it's funny you know Leif said says has to say like no choco looks like he yells do I look like I yell uh and then he always has to say but he never yelled at me right and no

And Lafell say I gave Jocco hundreds of opportunities or situations where I probably deserve to get yell at, yelled at, which is funny. But yeah, I'm not yelling. I mean, think about where you're at. Think about how effective you are as a communicator if you get to a point where you're yelling at someone. Look, if I'm yelling at you to tell you to get away

from the freaking edge of the building because you're about to slip or whatever. Obviously, if I have to yell at you to get over the sound of machine gunfire, Obviously if I have to raise my voice so everyone in the room can hear me. That's not what we're talking about. But me yelling at you in front of the team is just stupid. And he's specific about like yelling at people in front of the group to to berate them for a mistake that they've made. No, don't do it. And I'm going to say don't do it. Just don't do it. What'd you write down over there, Dave? Well, you've said something in the past and and I think there's an element to what he's saying. that you can even take it a step further is, listen, yelling at somebody else in front of a whole bunch of other people,

I cannot think of a time where that's okay. And I'm not talking about raising your voice to get a particular action because the sound is loud. I'm talking like, we get the team, Jocko screwed something up, and I start yelling at Jocko. So I can't even imagine a scenario where that's okay. But you even talked about it too. Like the times that you've had to yell at someone or raise your voice,

I think the element that you've talked about that's so important is that you were aware of that. That was based on an escalation of a whole series of other approaches that did not get the reaction, which is different than, yeah, Jocko, like, I just lost my temper. I just no longer had control of myself and I just started screaming at somebody. You know, even inside the idea of yelling, which on very rare occasions, there are some times that you're going to have to do that, that you're still aware that you're doing that. Yeah. As opposed to just, well, you know, I just got a bad temper and that's just kind of how I am.

So I can't control myself. And I look back and go, wow, I shouldn't have done that. I didn't even realize I was doing. I totally lost control in a leadership role. And how important I think that story of even the few times in your career you've had to do that, you knew what you were doing. Yeah. Yep. I cannot think of any situation where I yelled without thinking about like, okay, I need to yell right now.

And yeah, let's say you get a group. Let's see your whole platoon's there and all of a sudden you get somebody that does something really stupid and it's an opportunity for everyone to see hey This can't happen and obviously I haven't gotten that message across Sure. I might dress someone down in front of everybody and I might yell I really can't think of any times that I did that in my 20 year career that I off top of my head but it's not gonna be on accident Yeah, because you just lost control. No. Yeah. No. That's not happening. So don't be yelling number 14 understand and use judgment. No one to stop fighting for something you believe is right.

Okay. This is where we might start to get derailed on some stuff. So first of all, it's interesting that he says understand and use judgment. So there's a conjunction there. The first thing is just understand, which is an easy word to say, but it can be very difficult to do. So trying to understand the situation. And the reason that he has to say this is because so often people do things without understanding what's happening. So he's telling you, understand.

Understand what's going on. That's what you have to do. And the same thing is use judgment. Do you think that someone would have to tell a leader to understand and to use judgment? No. Why does he have to say that in here? Because people all the time neither understand nor use judgment. So be careful with those two.

Now he says, no one to stop fighting. for something you believe is right. And here's where I probably have the first maybe separation in understanding or separation or separation in belief in what he's saying here. Maybe it's not. But I think most of the time I'm not fighting for something I believe to be right because I don't really care if I'm right or not. And the reason I don't care if I'm right or not is because most of the time, I'm not,

is because most things don't actually matter. That's why. So Dave believes we should do it one way. Dave's believes we should attack the target from the north. I believe we should attack it from the west. And I'm going to fight about that. Most of the time it doesn't matter, north or west.

It just doesn't matter. Dave wants to invest $18,000 in this software system. I want to invest $12,000 in a different system. And guess what? it probably doesn't matter. There's some advantages to the 18,000 1. There's some advantage to the 12,000. We don't really know how it's going to impact.

We've never done this kind of interface before. And I'm going to commit my relationship value, my leadership capital. Like I'm going to commit all this stuff to me just thinking I'm going to be right. I'm going to, no. No, I'm not going to do that. It's just a stupid thing to do. So 99% of the time, these things that we're fighting for actually don't matter. or you're fighting for something that's in the future

that you don't know the actual outcome to. So that's most of the time for me and that's a very powerful lesson is you're sitting there thinking, but I wanna do it my way and it doesn't matter. We should use this marketing company, not that marketing company. We should invest in this piece of equipment

or that piece of equipment. I wanna get this backhoe and not that backhoe. Guess what? It probably doesn't matter that much. And by the way, if it does matter that much and there's a real reason and I say, hey Dave, the reason I like this, backhoe better is it has the following capabilities that the backhoe you want to get done

to have it can do this this this this and this it's this more efficient and boom does this make sense to you if i can't articulate the reason why something is better it's probably not worth arguing over so there's your litmus test let's let's put that one write that one down if you're having a hard time articulating why your plan is better than someone else's plan your plan is probably not worth arguing over because it's too hard for you to clarify. The reason it's hard for you to clarify is because they're both basically the same thing. Or there's risk involved in both of those items.

So this idea does know when you stop fighting for something you believe in right? First thing, I'm gonna run this thing through a filter that is so powerful that the filter's gonna filter out most of the arguments I'm gonna have with people. Because it doesn't really matter. Most things don't matter. Look, are there occasional things that matter?

Yes, there are occasional things that matter. And when those things that matter, it's so easy to articulate why they matter and it's so easy to sway people's opinions because the facts are there. So it doesn't turn into an argument. It turns into, hey, let me ask you some earnest questions about what you think and let me give you my perspective over here

and people see it. So I don't generally have to know when to stop fighting for something I believe right because I'm generally not fighting for it. And when I do need to approach somebody about something, All I need to do is ask them some earnest questions. And the truth is revealed to them by them answering their own questions. This is, I mean, there's a lot inside this.

And just trying to like imagine the affront to your ego when someone says, stop fighting for what you think is right. Yeah. You're like, I will never stop fighting. And what this is probably from is someone who's observed hundreds of people sell all their leadership capital and all their credibility over something that literally does not matter. I was with the company. They were doing a workshop about picking a logo for their company.

And they kind of narrowed it down with three different options. I looked at the three and they're like, they were all pretty good. One was like, me. And the other two were like, pretty good. And so sort of quickly it got to like, we're not going to do B, but A and C are they're good. They were both good. And you know what? you could make a case for A, you could make a case for C, which tells me like, they're both good.

They're both good, which means it doesn't matter. But what we started to see was like the A group and the C group are not going to budge. And if you use this, the phrase like, hey, Jocko, I know you're supporting on A, I want you to stop fighting for what you think is right. If I say it like that, like, it's almost impossible for you to say, okay. But the part that you're emphasizing, which is so important is the idea that it doesn't matter. and how quickly you can get entrenched into something that you will sell every piece of credibility you have, which means your influence in the future can go to zero

because you want the round logo and I want the square logo. Yep. And by the way, so you're taking all that, all that leadership capital and all that future influence and you're putting it all on the, you're pushing it all in. You're going all in on this thing that doesn't really even freaking matter. And a gamble because you look up in six months and like, hey, this logo is we're not getting the traction we want. But you put all in and now you look like an idiot. Instead of going, you know what, Dave?

Yeah, we'll go see. That looks, they're pretty close. Cool. Sounds good, man. I reserved all. I kept all my money to myself. I kept all my leadership capital. I kept all my future.

In fact, I made, because I agreed with you, because I supported your plan, I got a little bit more. I took some more off the table. I actually grew my leadership capital in that moment. And now when we look up in six months and your logo that you picked isn't really getting the tracks we wanted to, I get even more because I say, okay, well, you know, we tried it. Doesn't seem like we're getting the tracks we want. Do you want to try this other logo now? Boom, and all of a sudden, and now my logo goes out and wins.

I get even more leadership. It's like crazy. But we'll burn our bridges and throw away our leadership capital over, over, what's the word here? Fighting to build something we believe is right. It's this is not the way to view the world the way to view the world is that 99% of things don't matter and Then then they're in the future and look if you come to me with a logo that's freaking stupid Totally you know I'm like hey Dave that logo that you put together he's like how do you like it Dave? Just so you know it's pretty much looks like a swastika, you know, but it's orange and you're like oh

Oh, you know, like, okay, maybe we should not go with that, right? Okay, you're like, oh, I didn't even see that. Okay, great. You know, boom, we're done. Or, you know, you approach me, hey, Jocco, what do you think of this? Oh, Dave, it's a pentagram. Like, no, we're not going to use satanic ritual stuff or not. Okay, cool.

You're like, got it. How do I not see that? Boom. So we're done. But you're like, it's a star, but, you know, I want to show that we're flipping over the star. Yeah, that's a pentagram, dude. So you see where we're going on this? The chances that you come to me with a logo that's unusable is almost non-existent.

And we want to fight amount things that we quote believe is right and it's not worth it. And you're throwing away leadership capital. And by the way, if there is something that's completely wrong and it is time to stand your ground because someone's doing something immoral, unethical, or illegal, then cool, that's where you hold the line. Of course. If somebody wants to do something that is you're a morally against. somebody wants to rip off a client and you're like hey we're not doing that we're not doing that

it's like okay so we want to make an you know put some product out there that's dangerous and it's we got some flaw in it but you know what let's just sell it anyways no we're not doing that that's all we're talking about and if that happens of course then you you you take the right action and you don't back down and even in that case what you need more than anything in those cases is leadership capital, this credibility, is a reputation of someone who only digs in on those. And if you're gonna sell it all on round versus square or red versus blue on the logo,

when those important times do come, nobody's gonna listen to you. When it actually matters, they're not gonna listen to you because they're so used to you saying, I am not giving up my position. It's logo A or death. Come on, man. So there's some,

human nature here that this guy's obviously he's seen of people willing to dig out on things that just don't matter and then when it does matter nobody's listening to you yeah at uh at eshlan front you know jami r c-o-o she's told me like if i push back against her like more than twice she's like she says to herself like i'm wrong about this i got to go figure this something out there's something i'm wrong she's like if you're pushing back against me if you ask me like three questions i'm like oh there's something i don't see her i'm wrong i'm going to figure this out And it's because 99% of the time, I'm like, yeah, it sounds good. Yep, go execute.

Yep, sounds good. Yeah, that's a better plan than I had. Boom, boom, boom, boom. So when I say, pump the break, she's like, oh, there's something wrong. As opposed to her thinking, oh, God, he never likes anything. Oh, here we go. What do you know? How do you want to do it, John?

It's like, no. Don't back yourself into that corner. That's that healthy sense of self-doubt you've talked about before. I think that, you know, Jamie's a perfect example of where, you know, if you believe you're right, how often are you really believing that you're 100% right? If that's a pretty regular thing, you might want to check that. I know I'm not right a lot of the time. And if somebody else is giving you some feedback, maybe listen to that too.

And like Jamie, if she starts to get some feedback, she has that humility to say, what am I not seeing here? How can I solve this problem? Yeah, yeah, don't put yourself in that position. So there you go. That's, I guess, my first disagreement a little bit with, with Glover Johns here. Last couple points here. Number 15, and this is another one that.

Okay, so number 15, discuss and argue your point of view until a decision is made and then support the decision wholeheartedly. So again, just using the term argue and saying, your point of view, I'm not going to need to argue my point of view because I'm not married to my point of view because the chances are you see something I don't see. The chances are I'm not 100% right. The chances are my idea is flawed. That's what the chances are. So I'm not going to quote argue my point of view until a decision is made.

I don't need to. I might ask earnest questions. I might try and see your perspective. I might try and understand why. I might ask you why this is the best way, but I'm not quote, arguing. my point of view. Because what is my is my subordinates plan so freaking crazy? Is my boss's plan so totally insane that I need to completely argue against it? This is basically a run on off the last statement. I don't need to argue because I'm not married to my plan because my plan could be

wrong and it probably needs adjustments. And it by the way, if it's so awesome and your plan sucks so bad it's not I don't have to argue it for very long because I go hey Dave your plan is to do this and if we do that we're going to lose all this and you go oh cool what did you want to do and I go I want to do this and you go that sounds good so we shouldn't have to quote argue now when a decision gets made I am going to do my damnedest to execute on that thing but you know I try and think of all my life and the times that I got told you know what jocko what your your points are taken, we don't care, go and execute this other thing that's the opposite. I just can't think of situations where that happened.

I just can't think of situations where people said, hey, shut up, Jocko, do what I told you to do. That's it. And I'm thinking, oh, this is going to have a terrible outcome. There's times where I've said, you know, this isn't going to be quite as efficient. Or this might take a little bit longer. Or there might be a higher risk on this maneuver over here. but by doing that higher maneuver risk, we're going to save some speed and security over on this other side.

So I've never just like had an idiotic plan that I wasn't able to say, hey, boss, can I talk this through with you? Or hey, you know, subordinate, can you talk me through this so we can understand it better? Yeah. I think that's pretty straightforward. Yeah, I think there's again some human nature inside there. I'm kind of picturing again, these scenarios that have played out in my life. as I'm hearing you talk about the explanation of this, this leadership attribute, this behavior you want to apply.

Top Gun, this happened a lot, this discussion, these debates on right or wrong or how we should do something. And we would do these things called staff exercises. So class would be over. It's the 25 instructors. We'd lock the door. And we would have debates over how we should do. We were very SOP heavy. We had standardization across the board.

There was a way to do a lot of things, not everything, but a lot of things. And our job was to standardize it so we could teach it. And we would, at the end of each class, talk about what worked and what didn't and what we needed to change. And there'd be different camps. There'd be one camp that said we should do it like this, another camp that should do it like that. Now, what was interesting about that is it, they weren't like 90-10 where, oh, this one camp has this awesome plan, this other camp has this awful stupid plan.

They're actually both camps like, damn, those are. Two pretty good plans. Yeah, those are pretty good ideas. I see the merits of that. I see the merits of this. And listen, we, we wanted, arguing is the wrong word because that has a kind of a negative tone, but like pretty healthy to bit. Dues go back and forth. And they would, they would dig in to really make sure they was understood.

And it was managed by a guy who ran these meetings. And he was called the standardization officer who facilitated like, all right, what are you thinking there, Jock? Why are we doing that? And I would capture those in notes and say, okay, what he's saying is this. Listen, in the end, there was a winning side and a losing side. And then we had to make a decision. So you have this group of people that believed in a certain approach, and in the end, we would pick a different approach. Where the problem would come, which sometimes is someone's ego would come into play, we'd then go implement this with a squasion or a class or something, and then I'd sit down and I'd go, hey, the way we're going to do this problem, Jock, we're going to do it like that, and you're like, why?

And I'd say, well, listen, I actually didn't want to do it this way, but here's how we're going to do it. So that little need for me to still be right, for me to get my way and not accept the outcome, I would poison the reality of, and it's the part you said that's so important, so we don't really know if we knew there wouldn't be a debate. And so the only way to find out is actually go out there and do it. But rather than me say, hey, here's the reasons why,

A, B, C, and D, let's go X, you, get some good feedback. I'd say, I didn't really want to do this. I actually think this is kind of dumb, but we're going to go do it anyway. Now, what are the chances if I take that approach that when we go execute, I'm really going to get the feedback to come back and go, hey, guys, we executed on this plan three times. And look, it did not work.

We need to make some changes. And go, okay, cool, let's go back to the drawing work. I'll do that all day long. And we'd see it rarely, but we'd see guys go, well, I didn't get my way. So I'm not going to support this plan. I'm going to let you know that, yeah, we're going to go do this, but I think this is dumb. And there's no way that's going to work. So inside that of, hey, if you lose the debate, if you lose the argument,

And you don't get your way, unless you were convinced that the other side is there to destroy the company. Don't just agree with it. Get on board. Get on board. And the best it'll work. And at worst, she'll come back. Go, hey, man. Hey, Jock, we ran this a couple times. There's some feedback here. We can make some tweaks. And now I can take that plan and I can influence and get a better outcome for the team. Yeah. I think Jason Gardner at the monster was like, oh, what's the best plan? my plan, of course. That's where everyone thinks my plan's the best plan. And so then what we're talking about right now

is we're talking about a situation where you've got six and one half dozen the other, right? We've got six and one half dozen the other. Okay, cool. Dave's got six. I'm saying half dozen. If we're having that hard of a time figuring out whether to go to six or half dozen,

guess what? They're both kind of equally valid and guess what my default is. My default is, you know what, Dave, sounds good. Let's go with your plan. Say, look, I'm thinking half dozen. You're thinking six. Let's go with your plan right now.

And I'm going to execute, just like you just said, I'm going to execute it to the absolute best of my ability. That way, we can see if it works or not. And by the way, as long as I didn't dig my heels in like a jackass, if I said, you know, you said, well, hey, what about this, Dave? And you said, yeah, I know, but most of the time. And I go, well, okay, you know what? You know, it seems like yours covers the same thing for the most part.

It's a little bit of a different direction. But let's, let's give it a shot. I'm down. And my leadership capital just went up. and I don't look like an idiot. The person that looks like an idiot is like, no, my points are more important than your points. So my default mode, when we're in a 50, actually my default mode is like, hey, we're going to go with Dave's plan, but certainly in a 50-50 situation, it's like, it doesn't matter.

See, it still doesn't matter. Because as you first started talking through that, I was like, oh, so this is something that matters because you got this people saying this. But no, you can't satisfy both things. Well, I guess maybe you could find a compromise that you could create. But in lieu of some kind of a compromise, you know, you either do this procedure or that procedure. When this happens, when you get this tail lock on your plane, you can do this or this. And there's some advantage to this and there's some advantage to this and there's an advantage to that.

Okay. They both have advantages. Guess what? Which one do you want to do it, Dave? You want to do this one? Cool. We'll do that one for it. We'll do this one for now.

Boom. It's so easy. So again, I don't have to argue my point of view because I'm not going to back myself into a corner because I'm not going to give away my position because I'm not going to be married to something that I don't know about that we can't determine the impact of the future on. People want to bet so much on the future when we don't know what's going to happen in the future. Yeah, it's crazy. And think about what I do to the relationship. If I do what you just said and I go, hey, you know what? Honestly, dude, I came in coming with the planet going, you know, six.

And I hear you want to go half dozen. Hey, let's go execute. And if I project in my mind the next conversation we're going to have, I'm going to win on both because I'm going to come back and go, hey, dude, I did your plan. Dude, it was awesome, man. We crush it. That was awesome, man.

Thank you for that feedback. The team did really well. And it's awesome. Or I come back and go, dude, I ran with the half dozen plan, man. And we kind of got rolled a couple times here. What are you seeing? I'm kind of seeing the same thing. But either way, we're good.

But if I don't take that approach, That next conversation about the future that we do not know is almost always going to have some sort of friction. There's going to be some argument. So if I can even just project in my mind by going with your plan, I'm going to win no matter what because I'm going to come back and go, dude, you're awesome. Great idea. Thanks, bro. Or I'm going to come back and go, dude, I'm still struggling. Can you walk me through this?

We are not getting past these steps. And you're going to either go, hey, dude, we're having the exact same problem. So we might need to go back to the drawing board. Or, hey, that's a great question. We did this, this and this. Either way, we're winning because the team, the team is winning and our relationship is stronger for it. And you see guys all the time just dig in. I very often see losing as a winning.

And this is a classic situation. Oh, Dave, I was wrong. You were right. You're awesome. To me, I wrote about that in leadership strategy and tactics. I'm like, hey, it gives me the opportunity to prove how humble I am. Because by the way, I'm running around trying to make calls, trying to make decisions. And I'm the one that's having to put word out.

And when all of a sudden Dave does something better, I go, hey, Dave. Dude, awesome work, man. You were definitely right about it being a half dozen and not six. Sweet. That's an opportunity for me. And yet people see it as losing and they won't take it. So be careful of this one. Last one, pretty straightforward.

Stay ahead of your boss. Kind of brilliant, right? Stay ahead of your boss. And stay ahead of the power curve. To me, stay out of your boss. Another way of thinking about this is, when it comes to functioning as a human, think strategic and think long term. That's how you stay ahead of your boss.

You stay ahead of your boss by your boss says, there's a fire right now, put it out, and you go, cool, got it, boss, and then you look to see where that next fire is going to be. It's as simple as that. It's as simple as that. Stay ahead of your boss. Make your boss look good again. Leadership strategy and tactics. Make your boss look good.

What an incredible way to build a good relationship with your boss. What an incredible way to build leadership capital with your boss. Make your boss look good. That's my goal. Do I want the credit? No, I want Dave Burke, my boss to get the credit. That's what I want. Want him to look awesome.

You think Dave Burke's not going to take care of me? All day. So once Dave Burke is taking care of me, guess what I can do? I can take care of my team. And that's my mission. Well, now I can take care of my team. Now we can take care of the mission. And life is good.

That's what we're doing. And this is another thing that seems hard. That's not. It's just not hard. And if we spend less time lamenting everything wrong with our boss, you were talking about the OCD boss a couple minutes ago about, hey, and it worked for an OCD boss. Yeah, I remember.

And immediately this guy came to mind. And people hated working for him. They hated working for him. And look, I worked for him. It was not easy at first. I had to figure him out. But once I figured him out, it was super easy to work for him because I knew what he wanted. And I could stay ahead of him.

And I could anticipate the things that he knew. needed. And if you just spend less time thinking about what's wrong with your boss and all the dumb things he's making you do and send more time thinking like, all right, what is he trying to get accomplished? What's his personality like? What do I need to do to get ahead of him to help him so I can help the team? Cracking that code is usually not that hard. And when you crack the code, not only does your boss lives get better, your life gets so much better. It's so much easier. And just like you described, to push that down to the team, that's where that's where the win is it's like you can take care of your team you can help your team you can make sure your team

successful so if you're looking at this about how hard that is that's just your ego telling you well your boss is the problem there's nothing wrong with your boss just figure out what he wants and get ahead of him and it's really really not that hard all right well there you go those are some some simple rules for being a better leader and a better follower and a better human and here's the thing got to pay attention to you can only see these things if you detats And by the way, when you detach and you take a step back, the thing that you really have to detach from is still part of you. It's your ego. It's driving so many of these mistakes that we make.

So you can't just detach from the situation. You can't just detach from your boss. You can't just detach from the plan. You got to detach and be able to see your own ego, which is probably the root of 97% of these problems. So take a step back. Write these things down. Write these rules down. Just go take about face.

Write these rules down. Read them before you go to a meeting. Read them before you make a decision. Read them before you meet with your subordinate. Read through them. At the end, check yourself. How'd you do on them? And eventually, over time, this is how you become better

because you won't rely on having to read through these things. You'll start to know them. and they will become second nature. So there you go. All right, with that, Carrie, why are you here? Just so everyone knows, people that are freaking out right now.

Echo Charles, he needed a break, bro. He was, I mean, the stress level was high. He hadn't been cruising in at least a few days. And so Echo Charles, don't worry, everybody. EC will be back. He's okay. he just had to reset, you know? Had to recharge the batteries.

Recharge the mana. Yeah. Back on the island. Yeah. So he had to go get some island time in. That's where Echo's been. He'll be back hopefully. I don't know.

You never know. We'll see. Maybe you see it. You know, he'll make the call. Whatever. It's no factor. Keep covering and whatever. Whatever Echo needs, man.

We're just here. So don't worry. This is still the Echo podcast. He'll be back. It's kind of a lose-lose for you, isn't it, Kerry, being here? I mean, it's hard. Look, you know, Echo, he's kind of got that thing going where people just, he's just nice

and kind of like if you do something, anything different than him, even if you do the same thing as him, people are like, well, oh, look, are you trying to. Try to be like Echo. Trying to Jack Echo style. You're in a lose-lose situation, bro. Hey, I'm just happy to be here, man, you know. Just happy to be here. Sitting in the hot seat and everything, pressing record over there.

It's awesome, man, to get to cover down. Yeah, when he comes back, I'll be back in the shadows. Back in the shadows. Retreat to the shadows. Or maybe he'll get whacked. He'll just be like, well, it looks like I'm in here now. We'll give up the chair. Yeah, giving up the chair.

Dude, he gets bummed out. We were doing Jordan Peterson, and it got scheduled, and he was going to be in Hawaii, and he wasn't around. He was bummed about that one. Yeah. We were talking about that, you know, the Tim Kennedy podcast, you know. Yeah, he was kind of bummed about that one too. Be bummed about that.

Yeah. That was a good one, man. That was. That one went by quick. For how long it was? For how long it was. Almost five hours and 50 minutes. And then I was like, oh, that's a long, but also, Huberman was five hours and 20 minutes.

And of course, Sean Parnel was five hours and 25 minutes or something like this. That's a long time to be talking. If we were better, uh, milking, we would just bring. break it up in the four different podcasts. No, hey, don't worry, people. We got you. We got you. We're here.

We're going to put it out. One, one hit. A little bit of that immediate gratification for you. Dude, you know there's some people that look at that thing. They see five hours and 50 minutes and they go, oh, damn. Let me get that two X on. Speed that up. And there's also some people that are like, hell, yeah.

Oh, for sure. I'm definitely in that camp. Anytime I see a five-hour Jocko podcast, you just know. It's like yes. Well, the thing is, there's no time limit in either direction. Yeah. I'm not, there's no goal. Right.

We could go an hour. We could go five hours. I don't know. We'd go 12 hours. We'd go 30 minutes. If it's there, we'll roll with it. We're getting it. Yeah.

See, Tim and I had a lot of, you know, with the fight background. And he was doing all that stuff when I was like, we were in the game, right? At the same time. I was like older. I think I'm maybe eight years older than. him or something like this and so but you know Chuck Ladell I just saw Chuck Ladell at the UFC he said what's up how was that UFC that's cool it was good man it was awesome but we were so we had a lot to talk about there you know

but echo Charles be back with his powerful questions and opinions standing by until there speaking to being strategic make sure you say in shape make sure you keep your health that's strategic move keep healthy you know how you do that jocco fuel joccofuel.com how's the new flavors Dave so just FYI we have an energy drink it's called go and it will give you energy energy when we initially made it the the the taste profile was based on my taste buds which are not normal my taste buds are hypersensitive to the sweetness and so I tried these things I was like oh yeah that's very sweet That's, you know, this is good to go.

This basically tastes like a Coca-Cola to me right now. It's like just, well, I was wrong. And a lot of people that normally eat a lot of sugar, they were like, what is this? This doesn't taste good. So we redid all the flavors, all of them. Dave, you got your new afterburn orange. How was that going down today?

It's good. I'm in a similar boat. I never drank an energy drink before go, ever. I don't drink them. So I had no frame of reference. When we made the orange, I got to do all the flavor test. and all that stuff at the end, I'm like, this thing is incredible.

It tastes like an orange crush or whatever. I've had almost, not all, I've had almost all the new flavors, and they are ridiculously good tasting. So I'm over here thinking like, all right, I'm doing timing. I'm doing reasons. I got to anticipate all these. Now it's like, I just want to, I just want the way it tastes. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm drinking the citrus psycho, which was by far our worst seller. And the reason it's our worst sellers because the first one that came out, before I had any semblance of trying to make things taste good for the world at large. And now this one is freaking delicious.

So Lafabins, hey, to raid here, citrus, psycho. It tastes like, there's a reason that this was the first flavor that we made, by the way. The reason this is the first flavor that we made was because I thought to myself, what's the common flavor that everybody likes? eat, you know, well, it's lemon lime. Look at, look at Gatorade, look at Sprite, all those flavors.

And it's like, hey, lemon lime. This is a, this is a standard flavor. It's like chocolate vanilla, right? It's the same thing. It's like, oh, you're going to make it protein shake? Cool, chocolate or vanilla or strawberry. That's what this was to me. So this was the first flavor.

That's why. But, man, I didn't sweeten it enough. And now this thing is, and it's still. It's still sugar-free. It's still keto. It's still all-natural. It's still pasteurized. It's still freaking all the same qualities of awesomeness, but it tastes delicious.

So there you go. Joccofuel.com. Check all that stuff out. Check out some milk. Do you have some milk over the 4th of July? I did. Of course. I was talking about that on that last podcast.

I'm up to two milkshakes a day now. Yeah, because once you start tracking them macros, you need that extra hitter of protein. You got two. Yeah, if it can be measured, it can be managed or whatever. Do you go two scoops in a milk or do you go one? No, I go one. I double it up.

You double it up. Double up that hitter. Joccofuel.com. Go to Wawaa if you want the drinks. Go to vitamin shop. Go to H.E.B. down in Tejas. We got you.

And try the new flavors. The new flavors are kind of hitting the stores right now. So what's it? July. By August, I think we'll be in all new flavors. But go, go get them. OriginUSA.com get some cool American made apparel. Up with the UFC, a lot of people were pumped.

A lot of people were pumped on the hunt line coming out on the, you know, I had guys, every ghee I have as an origin geese. I'm like, hell yeah. American made. So if you want to get on the American made train, then go to origin USA.com. Get yourself Jiu Jitsugee. Jeans. People representing the jeans.

That's freaking legit. You know, it's a sad day when your iconic American jeans are not made in America. But guess what? They are now because now the only pair of iconic jeans you can get is good old origin USA.com. Get some of that Jocco store. That's where we have stuff that might help you on the path. Might help you on the path.

Echo has been busy too on some new Discipline Equals Freedom shirts. Really? Some new ones. Yeah, go check those out. Some new colors on there. And there's like a little bit of a jiu jihitsu line that's forming as well. Oh, yeah. That jih T-shirt is quite popular.

It is. It's super clean. And then we've got the Dean Lisch on there as well. The D-Lis. Do we have the foot-soldier one yet? I want to make a foot. He's got that little sticker that says foot-soldier. And it's like a Dean Lister in like a NOM style helmet.

And it just says foot-soldier. I mean, come on. We've got the foot. The foot. Yeah. The D-Lis-Lister foot. Yeah. So there you go.

But also shirt-locker. new shirt every month with that and we've been just going going pretty hard on those. The last month was pretty awesome if you if you got that. What was last month's shirt? Or it might have been a month before last. I think we did kind of a GI Joe style. Oh yeah, yeah. That was the discipline one, but it looks GI Joeish.

Right, right. And then the Charlie Mike was, I believe, after that. So there you go. Jocco store.com. You can check some of that out. Subscribe to the podcast. Jock Underground. Jocco Underground.

You know, jocco underground.com, if you want to, if you're, if you're nervous about the platform, look, we don't own the platform that you're listening to it unless you're listening to us right now on jockunderground.com, then we own it. No one can stop us. We got that. We got to listen on some of the other platforms that are out there. Look, we don't own them. And they could shut us down. They could censor us. Maybe they don't want us talking about war. Maybe they don't want us talking about whatever we're talking about. And we've got to be aware of that. We got to have a contingency plan. So jock owner ground.com is a contingency there. And I've written a bunch of books. If you want to check out the books that I've written, go to Amazon and buy them all. We have Eschlam Front. Dave and I work at Eschlam Front. We solve problems through leadership. We take these principles of combat leadership.

We teach people how to apply them inside their business. Get your business aligned around leadership. If you have problems, they're leadership problems. So Eschlamfront.com. Come to the muster. Next muster is in Atlanta, Hotlanta, October 2. 12th through the 14th. We're going to sell it out.

We sell out everything. So come and check that out. We have the Extreme Ownership Academy. Online, extreme ownership.com. We got courses. We're about to record a course today. We're doing a course on relationships and the value of relationships. How to build relationships.

How to maintain relationships. Why relationships are so powerful. So these are the kind of conversations that we have on that. platform that you can study, you can test, you can learn. And leadership is not an inoculation. You can't read extreme ownership one time and be like, cool, got it. It doesn't work. And for a while, I'd say, well, you know, you want some more of that stuff, listen to the podcast. But then now there's 341 podcasts. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours. I can't say, well, just go listen to podcast. Now we had to, we had to streamline it and distill it down.

the principles so that people could learn them and actively train in them, just like you go to the gym, just like you train Jiu-Jitsu, just like you pick up your Git Box and play guitar at night. If you're not practicing, you're not learning. So go to Extreme Ownership.com, check out the courses. Also, I'm on there live a bunch, at least once a week. I'm on there answering questions. So Extreme Ownership.com, come and check that out. Also, if you want to help service members active and retired, their families, Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee. mom mama Lee she's got an awesome charity organization she helps with health issues

putting give putting service members through health protocols that aren't paid for by the military but that are extremely helpful so America's mighty warriors dot org check that out if you want to donate or you want to get involved also check out heroes and horses dot org Micah he's up there in the mountains right now just getting it teaching people what's up And of course on Twitter on the gram on Facebook Dave's at David R. Burke Carries at Kerry underscore Helton he didn't get that he didn't get the real one. Not fast.

Had to throw that underscore in there too slow. Yep just a just a forever sign of being a little too slow. Everybody knows and if you want to see me on there I'm at Jocka. Willick no underscoring there no period no dot nothing just got in there. early coming at you while you're in there just watch out because the algorithm might grab me by the by the leg and start dragging you down so be careful of that and thanks to all our military personnel out there the current and future Glover Johns thanks for doing what you are doing out there every day to lead and protect

our country and the same goes to our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service all you first responders thank you for what you do every day to protect us here at home and everyone else just try and remember and implement these simple lessons from Glover Johns things like do the small things well things like be a doer and a self-starter never be satisfied have consideration of others remember that the heart of the training the more the troops are going to brag. These are all things that are simple, but not easy.

But if you do get them and you do implement them, you'll be a better leader and you'll be a better human being. So go out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Dave and Kerry and Jocko. Out.