Motivation Daily by Motiversity - DO NOT QUIT - Admiral McRaven Will Leave You Speechless (Must LISTEN)

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Navy Admiral William H. McRaven, one of the most decorated US commanders, delivers one of the best motivational speeches you will ever hear. “Life is a struggle and the potential for failure is ever present, but those who live in fear of failure, or hardship, or embarrassment will never achieve their potential. Without pushing your limits, without occasionally sliding down the rope headfirst, without daring greatly, you will never know what is truly possible in your life.” ― William H. McRaven Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello listeners, Motivirity is excited to share that we have launched a new podcast called Morning Motivation by Motivore. If you are looking to start your day with positivity and the most uplifting motivational audio, this is the show for you. For today's episode of Motivation Daily by Motivority Podcast, we are sharing a recent episode from the Morning Motivation Podcasts. If you like it, go follow the show. New episodes are being released every week. The link is in the description. Seal training, which is six months long, really was a microcosm of life. I mean, it was about the challenges that you had every day in seal training

were the same sort of challenges you were going to face in life. You were going to fail. You had to build relationships. There were going to be bullies out there. There were bad things that happened in that six months. that to me, after now almost 37 years after I had gone through seal training, I realized that it really was a reflection of life at large. Only about a quarter of those who go through Navy SEAL training actually make it. It's an astoundingly low percentage.

What's the difference between those who succeed and those who fail? In my class, we had an American Indian, we had African Americans, we had Polish, French, we had a lot of first generation kids. There's only one thing that we all have in common. And it isn't our physical fitness. It's the fact that we didn't quit. I'm going to kind of walk you through my career and just give you this sense of some of the things that I have learned along the way. Big Navy says no way. Big Navy says no way.

And the only thing that we had in common when it was all done was we didn't quit. And the reason that's so important, I think, for a seal is, is not about the concern are you going to quit on the mission. Because the mission sometimes fills you full of adrenaline and you just keep going. But you're going to have a thousand opportunities to quit in your career. You know, in the military, you move every couple of years. It's hard on your family. You can always find reasons why you're just not going to move another time.

It's hard on your family. It's hard on your friends. It's hard on everything. And so there's a lot of opportunities to quit on your family, to quit on your friends, to quit on the mission. But if you have learned early on that the one thing that sets you apart is that you don't quit, then you can make it through those tough times. I didn't want to be a quitter.

I didn't want someone to think that I wasn't tough enough to make it through. Oh, you better get out of my way now. Oh, you better get out of my way now. I was a midshipman here going through the Naval ROTC program, and in the very first semester of Naval ROTC, you get Navy history. And so we talk about all the great naval battles out there. but the young lieutenant who was teaching the class at the time talked to us about Chester Nimitz. So the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor in 1941. In 1942 now Nimitz is debating whether he is going

to engage the Japanese fleet at this tiny little island in the Pacific called Midway. Well, most of his staff thought it was a bad idea. Nimitz is really grappling with this should I try to engage the Japanese fleet in Midway. And he goes to see one of his closest friends, Admiral Bull Halsey, and Halsey of the time had shingles and he was in the hospital in Pearl Harbor. So Nimitz goes to see him and he tells him about his dilemma and he says, you know, I just don't know what to do. And Halsey was this kind of gruffled Admiral and he says, well Admiral, you used to tell me when in command, command. And the point was you're in charge, take charge. Make the hard decisions because that's what people expect when you are the commander. Whenever I thought about the difficult decision

that I had to make, I thought how they paled in comparison to the decisions that Nimitz had to make. And it always came back to me. They went in command, command. It's just that kind of, that kind of, hey, it kind of soothes the soul. When you are in a leadership position, and I don't care whether you're, you know, leading two people at Starbucks or whether you're leading a giant corporation or whether you're leading, you know, Navy SEALs, you get a certain energy in command. And we used to talk about it in the military. there is the energy of command. People a lot of times think that that energy comes from, you know, the clouds or from, it comes

from the people you're leading. You know that as a leader you have a responsibility to the men and women that you are leading. When things are, they're toughest, that's when they need you the most. That's when you have to show up. And if you show up and your heads hung and your shoulders are slumped and you don't look like you have a plan for getting through the tough times, that will spread through an organization like wildfire. And so your responsibility as a person in a leadership position is when things are their worst, that's when you have to step up.

And you can't have a bad day on those days. Now, we all have bad days. I mean, we all have bad days, but you take those bad days and you keep them in your office. Or you, as I talked about with your swim buddy, you talk to somebody about it. But when you have to address the people that are serving you, that you are serving, that are responsible for you. for getting the work done, you better make sure you are clear-eyed, shoulders back, head up, look confident, and make sure you've got a plan to move forward through the tough times. And there are so many times when, you know, you're doing an after-action report

and you're talking to a young soldier who, you know, charged a machine gun nest or saved his buddies or whatever it was. And invariably when you talk to them, they say, look, I was just doing my job. I was doing what I was trained to do. And I would offer that that's a large part of it. You know when you're being trained that, okay, my job is to do this, and I'm going to stay here, you know, fighting the enemy in my field of fire, whatever it happens to be. But then there's a point where it is the fight or flight. And that's when you see the real courage come out.

If there is a way out of the problem set, those that don't have the courage will run. those that do will stay and fight. And it is always, you know, again, this may not come out quite right. But a lot of people think it is about, you know, the values we hold dear, you know, the flag. And yes, that is part of it. But it is more about this connection. It's about the man or the woman on your left and right. How much do you care about them?

Are you willing to sacrifice your life so that they can live? And it is in the quieter times where you reflect on why you did that and you realize it is about America. It is about our values. It is about the fact that we grew up with similar values, which is why I want to save your life. But it is more the connection. I had a general I used to work for talking about kind of the four stages. They said, look, we all go through this stage when we're young men in particular, you know, and I went through it with seal training. You have this challenge.

Okay, there's a challenge before me. I'm going to overcome that challenge. And then the challenge becomes an adventure. And for me, I'm sailing around the world. I'm jumping out of airplanes, locking out of submarines, I'm doing the sorts of things that I always wanted to do. And then it becomes a profession. And when I was about 15 years in, I became a commanding officer. And it's a profession.

It is the profession of arms. and you value that profession of arms and you learn everything you can. But at some point in time, it becomes a calling. And it is when it becomes a calling that it has this, you know, this effect on you that is hard to explain to people.

Oh, Lord, I want to stay. Oh, Lord, I want to stay. When you go through sealed training, for safety purposes, you are never by yourself. And frankly, when I went through, they were all Vietnam veterans that were my instructors. And they made sure you understood, look, I don't care where you are.

You always have a partner. You always have a swim buddy. And when you are actually going through training and you are diving, scuba diving, you are actually attached by a line, a short line, to your swim buddy. And so you have to work together. But your swim buddy is also there to make sure if you're underneath a ship that you don't get tangled in lines, that if you run out of air, he's going to take his regulator, share his air with you. And this idea of a swim buddy in the SEAL teams, you know, it starts with your swim buddy underwater.

But it's also when you're parachuting, you know, in the middle of the night, it's your swim buddy who kind of parachutes beside you and lands in, you know, enemy territory together. Oh, by the way, it's your swim buddy that checks your parachute before you jump. When you are kind of patrolling and you're out on the ground, you know who your swim buddy is. They're the ones that are checking your six to make sure the enemy doesn't come. And it is this idea that I don't care who you are. You need a swim buddy in life. You know, whether it is your spouse, whether it is your close colleague, you know, no matter who it is, you have to have somebody you can, you know, trust implicitly.

You had to get up every morning in the seal training and make your bed because it was going to be inspected. And as I've told folks before, the value of that, of the idea that, you know, you're going to get up, you're going to take a little pride in it. and it encourages you to do another task in another. And also about the little things in life. And that was what one of the instructors said, look, if you can't even make your bed to exacting standards, how are we ever going to trust you to lead a complex seal mission? Learn to do the little things right,

and you'll learn to do the big things right. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, it actually took on a little bit of a different meme, particularly when I was in Afghanistan. So I was a three-star admiral in Afghanistan. I was a second-ranking guy in Afghanistan, and I lived in what we referred to as a bee hut made by the Navy C-Bs. And it was just a plywood room.

And in my plywood room was a bed. That was it. The latrines, the heads were outside, there was no shelter, just a bed. A rack in Navy parlance. And every morning I would get up, I'd go do my PT. I'd come back and I'd make the bed. Because outside my bee hut was a wartime environment. Unfortunately, every week we lost kids in the United States.

combat. You know, civilians were inadvertently killed. Some admiral, some general, some president, some prime minister, somebody was yelling at me about something outside that door. And my days were long. I mean, my average day was probably 20 hours a day. And some days you'd go days before getting back to that room. But when I got back to the room and I opened my plywood door, the bed was made. And it gave me some sense of control of my life. And it, I mean, again, hard to kind of square the circle on why that's the case. But when you open the room and the bed is made, there's a sense of order. And I've told folks, look, it's a simple task.

But I really do think it makes a difference. Certainly makes a difference for me. It's just that kind of, a kind of, that kind of suits so. So, yeah, we have problems today. But here's why I am optimistic. I have great faith in this young generation. Take it from the millennials to the Gen Z to whatever's below the Gen Z, the Gen X. And I think people are always surprised by that when I say that

because there's this narrative out there that, you know, the millennials are these soft little entitled snowflakes. And of course, I've said it a thousand times, but then you've never seen them in a firefight in Afghanistan. or going to the University of Texas to make a better life for themselves and their families. It's a great generation of young men and women. Every generation thinks the next generation isn't good enough because they didn't walk three miles in the snow to get to school or whatever.

Well, I'm telling you, this generation is absolutely good enough to get us out of whatever problems we're in. And I think they will. And so I always remain optimistic. You have to.