Jocko Podcast - Jocko Underground: The Cure to Being Overwhelmed, Inadequate, and Afraid.

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

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This is the Jocko Underground podcast number 186 sitting here with Echo Charles. We've got a bunch of very interesting questions from you all. And we will provide answers in some cases, recommended courses of action in other cases, and maybe just overall guidance. Yeah. That's where we're at. Helpful guidance. Yes, indeed. All right.

First question. Good evening. I listen to your podcast a lot and it helps me stay disciplined in many areas of my life. In my mid-20s and after starting to work out consistently. for the first time in seven years, I decided to increase the plank time I was doing by 10 seconds after about a week and a half. So plank is, you know, when you're going your elbows, your feet, you know, you're rigid. Anyway, you time yourself, it's a thing. So for a week and a half. Okay, the first time I tried this, I found myself engaging in all this negative self-talk. Like, wow,

congratulations, sarcastically. You're now 10 seconds of planking less pathetic than you were a week ago. My question is, why can some of us struggle so hard to be happy with growth and acknowledge when we are acting with discipline and commitment in other ways as well. Beyond my planking, sincerely and with appreciation. I was kind of wondering how that was negative until you read it in the sarcastic voice, you know, because in my mind, it's like, oh, yeah, you actually are better there than you were a week ago. No, he said less pathetic, see what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, I get it. But it's like, bro, wow, congratulations. You are less pathetic now.

You know what I mean? Like that's a positive thing. And look, do you need to use the word pathetic? Probably not. I can tell you've been called things a lot worse than the word pathetic, especially in like basic seal training. They're telling you, you know, all kinds of words that are way worse than pathetic. But here's the thing, man.

I think what you should actually just focus on and to answer the question of how can you struggle so hard. Well, it's because you're focusing on the wrong thing. You need to focus on where you're going and like what you're doing good. You know, you can't if you're constantly looking at all the mistakes that you've made and all the times you lack discipline and all the places where you went off the path, that that's not helpful. That's not helpful for anyone. It's not helpful for me right now. I can tell you about a freaking house that I should have bought in 1993, that if I would have bought this house in 1993,

maybe it was 1994. If I would have bought that house in 1994, I would be a freaking real estate mogul right now. You see what I'm saying? I think about that probably once a year. I don't dwell on it. You know what I did do? In 1998, I bought a house.

It took me another five years before I was like, okay, I got about a house. I but that five years is a big time frame you know when you take away the compounding progress I would have made by buying a house five years earlier in a clutch zone You see what I'm saying it could have been a game changer My dad used to work our old used to work on computers in the in the early 80s early 80s Okay, we had a Commodore Vic 20 have you ever heard of that before yes I have Well, not the VIC-20 part, but Commodore.

The first one they made was called a VIC-20. And my dad got a Commodore Vic-20. And I think it came with 2.4 kilobytes of memory. And then we had a cartridge that brought it up to like eight kilobytes of memory. And I remember I was at school. And when you turned on the computer at school, it came up with a screen. And it said like, MS. DOS. Yeah, MS DOS, hell yeah.

Okay. That computer was a Texas instrument. And when I came home and I was on a Commodore VIC-20 and you turned it on, it said MS DOS. And I remember asking my dad, hey, dad, why do both these computers that are made by different companies? And I'm like 10 years old, 11 years old, maybe 12 years old. These computers are made by different companies. Why do they both say MS DOS? What is MS DOS?

And he's like, oh, that's Microsoft disk operating system. And I said, what's that? And he said, it's the thing inside the computer that makes it all work. And I said, that seems like it's a good company. And if my dad would have said, yeah, you know what? You're right. Let's buy $100 worth of stock. The whole life would be different.

It's different. You know what I'm saying? But we didn't buy that. Brutal. So am I dwelling on that? No, I'm not dwelling on that. I'm thinking about what we're doing here, what we're doing now, what we're going to do in the future. Did I learn from that? Sure. Learn from that. Did I learn from the real estate gig? Learn from it. So there's nothing wrong with learning from things in the past, but we don't want to, we don't want to focus on the things that we've done in the past, focus on where we were, focus on what we could have been. Like none of those things help you. They're a freaking waste. The action. The action is. that you're doing right now, those are real. That's what's real. And when you're doing the thing

that you're supposed to be doing right now, that's real. And no one can call you lazy when you're taking action. And no one can call you pathetic when you're taking action. No one can call you pathetic when you're improving. No one can call you pathetic

when you've taken ownership of your life and you're making things happen. When that's a situation you're in, it doesn't matter. What am I doing right now? You call me pathetic? You call me pathetic. Cool.

Look what I'm doing right now. I am factually not pathetic because I'm in the game. Now, when I talk about people can't call you that, it includes you. Because if you're taking action and you are doing the things you're supposed to be doing, you can't call yourself pathetic. What do you mean pathetic? I'm here doing planks right now. And I'm getting stronger.

And I'm getting fitter. And I'm getting better. And I'm disciplining my mind. And I'm disciplining my body. You control the voice that's in your head. You get to tell it what to say. You dictate the situation. You dictate the words you want to hear and that's where you got to be at.

There's no pathetic activities going on here. You cannot simultaneously be pathetic and working out at the same time. You can't do it. You can't do it. It's impossible. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground podcast. So if you want to continue to listen, go to jaco underground. and subscribe and we're doing this we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external

platforms so we are not subject to their control and we're doing this so that we can support the jocco podcast which will remain as is free for all as long as we can keep it that way but we but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors and we're doing it so we can give you more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this Legion of Troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you.

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