Jocko Podcast - Jocko Underground: The Name You Have Can Impact Your Success | Physical Prep | Rules?

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

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This is Jock Wonderground podcast number 60 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. We are sitting here getting ready to record this thing and I'm saying Echo Charles. I'm saying Jocco Willink. What's in a name? I was thinking about this the other day. It turns out there's a lot. There can be a lot in a name. There's a theory as I researched this.

There's a theory or should I say there's a hypothesis. that people tend to gravitate toward things in life that kind of fit their names, which is an interesting thing to think about. The hypothesis is called the nominative determinism, which means name-driven outcome. So whatever your name is, there's a decent chance that might influence the way you think and where you end up in life. maybe decent chance is a strong word.

We'll get some of the research here. There's an October issue of the psychologist. And it says that authors gravitate towards areas of research that fit their surname. This is research. The example in the article they use is there's an article on incontinence

from the British Journal of Urology. And it's written by Dr. A.J. Splat And Dr. D. Weed on. You see what I'm saying? It's kind of strange, right? It seems strange, yeah. There's another magazine, a British magazine, had some good examples. There's a guy named Andrew Drinkwater, who works at the Water Research Center.

There's a guy named Dr. Will Welfare, who works at the public health department in England. There's a guy named Alan Too Good, who's a Samaritan volunteer. A woman named Dr. Pan Graves, Pam Graves, and she's an archaeologist. There's a guy named Tom Kitchen. Guess what he is? He's a chef. Yes. You see what I'm going?

A woman named Sarah Blizzard, BBC, weather, weather reporter. A guy named Aaron Farr. He's a distance runner. When you speak of running, Usain Bolt. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, that's real. So there is a little bit of.

research behind this and look it looked like even the numbers that they threw up were it's pretty minimal it's not like this direct correlation but at the same time from I started thinking about this pragmatically like how does this apply to us as people in what we do and how we interact and how we interact in groups and how we lead groups if we're leading groups think about when you give a team a name or when you give a nickname to someone, right? So if you nickname your kid, dummy, you see what I'm saying?

How's that going to work out? If you nickname your kid Champ, hey, champ, come here. How's that going to work out? Look, is this 100% correlation? No. But let's face it, if you nickname your kid dummy or you nickname your kid champ.

Now look, you could nickname your kid champ and then think they should win everything and now they are a brat, right? Could that happen? Sure. But if you nickname your kid Knucklehead or you nickname your kid Ace. You see what I'm saying? These can have, and they did some legitimate

in reading some of these things. They had some legitimate things the way this turns out. And the real obvious examples is like naming a team or naming a military unit, Hackworth. In the Korean War, he took over Fox Company and changed it immediately to Fighter Company.

Think about what that does to the mentality. When he got to Vietnam, he took over the hopeless battalion and he changed it to the Hard Corps Battalion. I think we might have the Hard Luck. Hard Luck Battalion? Confused. But he changed the name to Hard Corps. Why? Because the other one doesn't even matter anymore because we're the hardcore.

I did the same thing. It's SEAL Team 3. Change tasking to Bravo. Tasking to Bruiser. So this is an important thing to think about. It's an important thing. Here's another thing. Like you're at work.

You got a guy on your team. What nickname do you give them? Now in the SEAL teams, it's awful. You're going to get a nickname that is making fun of you. That's the way it is. I mean, Dave Burke, you know Dave Berg's call sign? Yeah. Well, now it's a good deal, dude.

But the call saying, yeah, chip. Yeah, chip, which was making fun of him because he chipped his teeth on something, you know, some pilot thing. So name people and name things and nickname people, positive things, and you are going to at least have a chance that you have a positive impact on the scenario. And, you know, even you can nickname, you can name process. Like you have a process for something and if you name it you know the drag

Mm-hmm, no one's gonna like it yeah but if you call it lightning The people are gonna and you can see the government the government tries to do this stuff too right? Oh yeah yeah yeah they think things they frame it a certain way What do you think about your name echo? Yeah, I don't know I just I I don't know like the what depends on what you mean so you think it had an impact on your life? Yeah Yeah. Compared to you have a twin brother, right? Your twin brother, his name is also kind of unique, right?

Jade. Yeah. Did it have some kind of impact on you? Yeah. What kind of impact? What if your name was Bill? Yeah, it fell in line with the idea that I was just different a little bit, so I always felt different.

And I don't know in what way, to be honest, and I don't even know what even that even means. But you know, like, I guess most, that's kind of the irony, right? Where we all feel different. We all feel like we're different. Right a little bit I mean I don't know maybe we do maybe don't I know I did put it that way So even felt different yeah because your name my name was one of the things that made me Even more even more different like I guess when you think about it what that I had a twin brother that made me different Do you remember when you realize that you were a person? Yeah, what was it two years old?

What you remember? I'm doing this one when people would ask me how old are you? You know it's a common question and I do this and I remember seeing This like between my fingers Seeing your own fingers. Yeah. So between my two fingers, making a two. And then it like spirited. You ever did this where maybe when you're a kid, when you look at your hand and you're like, Holy cow.

Yeah, this is me. This is me like I'm a, and you just spiral into almost like insanity a little bit. You know, you ever get that? I remember. Yeah, that started at two years old. I remember. Yeah. I'm going to have to dig back into my memory because I remember thinking about this.

Like two years ago, I was thinking about it. I sort of remembered when I remembered it being like oh I'm a person and I have autonomy in the world and I can do what I want to do and there's gonna be forces fighting against me but I can get strong to where I can defeat those forces. Yeah that's remember those thoughts no I never had that for no I never had that thought well here's what I here's what I think so my my nickname Jocko is a nickname right but it's a nickname I've had ever since I was born so even before I was on that was my nickname what that what I think that did influence is that when I

would meet this is back in the 70s man there was no weird names everyone has a weird name now right like legitimately every kid is named so like it's a weird name very my my kids all have weird names like it's just a your kids have weird names right they're mediocre weird I guess it's not John Bill and Mike that's not Jen so back in the day when I was going into you know first grade second grade, kindergarten, you go out on the schoolyard, whatever. You're meeting Bill. You're meeting Frank.

You're meeting David. And then there's this freaking kid whose name is Jocko, which is a totally different type of name. They don't know what it is. So I'm immediately like you're going to get made fun of kind of. You're going to be noticed a little bit. And what you have to do is you have to be able to, at a very young age, I had to be able to negotiate a little bit of awkwardness and maybe a little bit of teasing or maybe a

little bit I had to learn to negotiate that at a young age. Yeah. And I think that made me comfortable interacting with people at a young age and thinking, oh, you know, my name is jaco, what kind of name is that? It's a dumb one, you know, but that's what my parents get. Whatever, like the little things. So I think that that, like the same as having the name Echo, kind of, you have to, you have to learn how to negotiate having a strange name that you actually have to explain.

Yeah. Every time. I probably had to explain my name to every person I met for the first 10 years of my life. Did they, that makes sense. Same here. You know what I'm saying? Still even now. What kind of name is Jocco?

And again, I think nowadays, you know, you meet people named whatever. They're named, they got, everyone's got a weird name. You go to the kids jitza class, it's a bunch of weird named kids, you know. Everyone's more unique now, I guess. But legit, back in the day, you know, my wife's name is Helen. her brother's name is John. My sister's name is Jenny. My other sister's name is Julie.

You know, like my dad's name is John. It's just, that's the way it is. Everyone just had normal names. And all of a sudden, boom, here's this weird kid named Jocko. Yeah. You got to, I got to explain that. I got to be able to contend with it. People are going to make fun of it.

Yeah. Did they ever make fun of you? Because Jocko is not a name, just like my name, is not a name that they're going to be mean about it. What name would they mean about? Um, if your last name was, I don't know, there's this, like hamburger or something. Yeah, you could get some bad last names. Yeah.

Yeah. Especially last names. Yeah, there's certain Filipino last names. If you're not Filipino, they'll sound funny. Like there's one, um, Macadang Dang Dang. That was one that I remember. Pretty common in Hawaii. Well, no, in the Philippines.

In Filipino, yes. And there's a lot of Filipinos in Hawaii for sure. So you had, you had a number of friends whose last name was macadangangang. Just, well, this was elementary school. So this was elementary school. So this was, and yeah, you're right. Later on in high school, there's like, yeah, there was a bunch of people named Macaname. But the first girl that came in, she came from the Philippines too.

So she had a thick Filipino accent. And her last name was Makadang Dang. When you're kindergarten first grade, second grade, that sounds funny. So they're going to be teasing it like it's an actual funny last name. Echo is like, oh, is there an echo in here? Oh, what's your name? Echo? What is it?

You know, like that kind of stuff. But that's not mean. That's just like, oh, they're trying to be funny or whatever. So yeah, you contend with that. Jocko doesn't seem like one that would be mean because it kind of sounds cool. Yeah. Then generally speaking, yeah, it was more of like curiosity or maybe make a little joke. You know, I used to say people like, who kind of name is that?

I'd look at him with a straight face when I was, you know, eight years old. I go, oh, it's short for Jock. 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 jocco underground.com 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.

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