Jocko Podcast - Standard Directive 008: The Good Things Add Up.

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

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Listen, when you make mistakes, they add up. They add up. One mistake compounds and leads to another, which leads to another, and they can lead you to a downward spiral of destruction. Here's the thing. You know what else adds up? The positive things. The good moves, the small sacrifices that you make to do things right.

The adjustments needed to. to correct problems, the daily discipline required to get you where you want to get to. Those little positive things add up too. And it's obvious and we know it, but here's the question, why don't we do them? Why don't we don't? Well, it's because in most cases,

it's because they add up slowly. They add up so slowly that you don't really notice the results. Right? One day in the gym, one day in the gym is basically imperceivable. Two days in the gym, you don't recognize any change whatsoever. A hundred days in the gym and you're almost a new person. Right? You've seen those before and after pictures. One day of playing guitar. One day of playing guitar, you can barely play one quarter.

A hundred days of practicing guitar and you can play literally almost any song. An hour of writing. An hour of writing and you've got a short kind of junky thousand word essay. A hundred hours of writing and you got yourself a whole book. So we let these things slip because it takes so long to see the progress we let them slip and when we don't do them it becomes zero times a hundred or zero times a thousand and that nets out to a zero when you do anything it adds up when you do nothing it amounts to zero so take the small steps every day do what you're supposed to do and don't expect some incredible results in one

day or two days or 10 days. Worth while things take 100 days. They take 500 days. Maybe they take 5,000 days. They take time, but it's little steps that add up. So put in the daily effort. Let that be your reward. Reward yourself. Feel gratification from knowing that you move the needle even just a little bit. Rome wasn't built in the day. The Grand Canyon, took millions of years to form. And whatever it is you want to do isn't gonna happen in one day. You have work to do.

And I know it's just a little bit. I know it's just a little tiny movement forward, but that work is what it takes. So go do it.