Motivation Daily by Motiversity - LISTEN EVERY MORNING: Admiral McRaven's Advice Will Leave You Speechless

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

Admiral William H. McRaven, a retired United States Navy SEAL, best known for his leadership in special operations, delivers one of the most POWERFUL motivational speeches. "The little things in life matter, If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right."― Admiral McRavenFollow Admiral Mcraven:https://www.instagram.com/williamh.mcraven/?hl=enMusic: Twelve Titans Music - Now you see meTwelve Titans Music - IllusionaryGabriel Lewis - Water will flow againDavid Celeste - Float with meCobby Costa - LuminousPerspectiveDavid Celeste - Winter morning sea smokeFrancis Wells - All those lettersDavid Celeste - How many years 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. What starts here changes the world. They expected the officers to set the example always.

To be there on time, to have the best-looking uniform, to run harder than anybody else, because that's what leadership is all about. And the only thing that we had in common when it was all done was we didn't quit. And while these lessons were learned, in my time in the military, I can assure you that it matters not whether you ever served a day in uniform. It matters not your gender, your ethnic or religious background, your orientation, or your social status. It always came back to me, a one in command command. Throughout your career,

you've got to find this right balance of professional distance and always understanding, never forgetting that the decisions you make have a direct impact on the men and women that work for you. Our struggles in this world are similar, and the lessons to overcome those struggles and to move forward, changing ourselves and changing the world around us will apply equally to all. Your responsibility as a leader is to always keep your head up and give people optimism and hope because you have done the hard work to get them through the tough times. But then there's a point where it is the fight or flight, and that's when you see the real courage come out. Things go bad. Things go bad in combat. Things go bad in universities. Things go bad. If you allow those failures to crush you, then you're not going to make the next hard decision. Seal training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered, but your will to succeed. And you always need to be in a position to make the next hard decision, but take into account the failures you've had.

So here are the 10 lessons I learned from basic seal training that hopefully will be of value to you as you move forward in life. Every morning in seal training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room, and the first thing they'd do was inspect my bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers would be pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard, and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack. It was a simple task, mundane at best, but every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle-hardened seals. But the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over.

If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made, that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better. So if you want to change the world, start off a big.

making your bed. During training the students are all broken down into boat crews. Each crew is seven students, three on each side of a small rubber boat, and one coxin to help guide the dinghy. Every day your boat crew forms up on the beach and is instructed to get through the surf zone and paddle several miles down the coast. In the winter, the surf off San Diego can get to be eight to ten feet high, and it is exceedingly difficult to paddle through the plunging surf unless everyone digs in. Every paddle, must be synchronized to the stroke count of the coxswain. Everyone must exert equal effort, or the boat will turn against the wave and be unceremoniously

dumped back on the beach. For the boat to make it to its destination, everyone must paddle. You can't change the world alone. You will need some help. And to truly get from your starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the goodwill of strangers, and a strong coxon to guide you. If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle. Over a few weeks of difficult training, my SEAL class which started with 150 men, was down

to just 42. There were now six boat crews of seven men each. I was in the boat with the tall guys. But the best boat crew we had was made up the little guys, the Munchkin crew we called them. No one was over 5'5 foot five. The Munchkin boat crew had one American Indian. African American, one Polish American, one Greek American, one Italian American, and two tough

kids from the Midwest. They out paddled, outran, and out swam all the other boat crews. The big men in the other boat crews would always make good-natured fun of the tiny little flippers the munchkins put on their tiny little feet prior to every swim. But somehow these little guys, from every corner the nation and the world always had the last laugh, swimming faster than everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us. Steel training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed, not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education, not your social status.

If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not by the size of their flippers. Several times a week, the instructors would line up the class and do a uniform inspection. It was exceptionally thorough. Your hat had to be perfectly starched, your uniform immaculately pressed, your belt buckle shiny and void of any smudges. But it seemed that no matter how much effort you put into starching your hat or pressing your uniform or polishing your belt buckle, it just wasn't good enough.

The instructors would find something wrong. For failing in uniform inspection, the student had to run, fully clothed, into the surf zone, then wet from head to toe, roll around on the beach until every part of your body was covered with sand. The effect was known as a sugar cookie. You stayed in the uniform the rest of the day cold, wet, and sandy. There were many of students who just couldn't accept the fact that all their efforts were in vain, that no matter how hard they tried to get the uniform right, it went unappreciated. Those students didn't make it through training.

Those students didn't understand the purpose of the drill. you were never going to succeed. You were never going to have a perfect uniform. The instructors weren't going to allow it. Sometimes, no matter how well you prepare, or how well you perform, you still end up as a sugar cookie. It's just the way life is sometimes.

If you want to change the world, get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward. Every day during training, you were challenged with multiple physical events, long runs, long swims, obstacle courses, hours of calisthenics, something designed to test your medal. Every event had standards, times you had to meet. If you failed to meet those times, those standards, your name was posted on a list.

And at the end of the day, those on the list were invited to a circus. A circus was two hours of additional calisthenics designed to wear you down, to break your spirit, to force you to quit. No one wanted a circus. A circus meant that for that day, you didn't measure up. measure up. A circus meant more fatigue and more fatigue meant that the following day would be more difficult and more circuses were likely. But at some time during seal training, everyone, everyone made the circus list. But an interesting thing happened to those who were constantly on the list. Over time, those students, who did two hours of extra calisthenics,

got stronger and stronger. The pain of the circuses built inner strength in physical resiliency. Life is filled with circuses. You will fail. You will likely fail often. It will be painful. It will be discouraging. At times, it will test you to your very core.

But if you want to change the world, don't be afraid of the circuses. At least twice a week, the trainees were required to run the obstacle course. The obstacle course contained 25 obstacles, including a 10-foot wall, a 30-foot cargo net, a barbed wire crawl, to name a few. But the most challenging obstacle was the slide for life. It had a three-level 30-foot tower at one end and a one-level tower at the other. In-between was a 200-foot-long rope. You had to climb the three-tiered tower, and once at the top, you grabbed the rope, swung underneath the rope, and pulled yourself hand over hand until you got to the other end. The record for the obstacle course had stood for years when my class began in 1977.

the record seemed unbeatable, until one day a student decided to go down the slide for life head first. Instead of swinging his body underneath the rope and inching his way down, he bravely mounted the top of the rope and thrust himself forward. It was a dangerous move, seemingly foolish and fraught with risk. Failure could mean injury and being dropped from the course. Without hesitation, the student slid down the rope perilously fast. Instead of several minutes, it only took him half that time. And by the end of the course, he had broken the record. If you want to change the world, sometimes you have to slide down the obstacles head first.

During the land warfare phase of training, the students are flown out to San Clemente Island, which lies off the coast of San Diego. The waters off San Clementi are a breeding ground for the great white sharks. To pass seal training, there are a series of long swims that must be completed. One is the night swim. Before the swim, the instructors joyfully briefed the students on all the species of sharks that inhabit the waters off San Clemente. They assure you, however, that no student has ever been eaten by a shark, at least not

that they can remember. But you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position, stand your ground. Do not swim away. Do not act afraid. And if the shark, hungry for a midnight snack, darts towards you, then summons up all your strength and punch him in the snout, and he will turn and swim away. There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim, you will have to deal with them.

So if you want to change the world, don't back down from the sharks. As Navy SEALs, one of our jobs is to conduct underwater attacks against enemy shipping. We practiced this technique extensively during training. The ship attack mission is where a pair of sealed divers has dropped off outside an enemy harbor and then swims well over two miles underwater, using nothing but a depth gauge and a compass to get to the target. During the entire swim, even well below the surface,

there is some light that comes through. It is comforting to know that there is open water above you. But as you approach the ship, which is tied to appear, the light begins to fade. The steel structure of the ship blocks the moonlight. It blocks the surrounding street lamps. It blocks all ambient light. To be successful in your mission, you have to swim under the ship

and find the keel, the center line, and the deepest part of the ship. This is your objective. But the keel is also the darkest part of the ship, where you cannot see your hand in front of your face, where the noise from the ship's machinery is deafening, and where it gets to be easily disoriented and you can fail. Every seal knows that under the keel at that darkest moment of the mission is a time when you need to be calm, when you must be calm, when you must be composed,

when all your tactical skills, your physical power, and your inner strength must be brought to bear. If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the dark. darkest moments. The ninth week of training is referred to as Hell Week. It is six days of no sleep, constant physical and mental harassment, and one special day at the mud flats. The mudflats are an area between San Diego and Tijuana, where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana sloos, a swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you.

It is on Wednesday of Hell Week, let you paddle down to the mud flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive this freezing cold, the howling wind, and the incessant pressure to quit from the instructors. As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening, my training class, having committed some egregious infraction of the rules, was ordered into the mud. The mud consumed each man till there was nothing visible but our heads. The instructors told us we could leave the mud if only five men would quit. Only five men, just five men, and we could give us. get out of the oppressive cold. Looking around the mudflat, it was apparent

that some students were about to give up. It was still over eight hours till the sun came up, eight more hours of bone-chilling cold. A chattering teeth and the shivering moans of the trainees were so loud, it was hard to hear anything. And then one voice began to echo through the night. One voice raised in song. The song was terribly out of tune.

but sung with great enthusiasm. One voice became two, and two became three, and before long, everyone in the class was singing. The instructors threatened us with more time in the mud if we kept up the singing, but the singing persisted. And somehow the mud seemed a little warmer, and the wind a little tamer, and the dawn not so far away. If I have learned anything in my time traveling the world,

it is the power of hope, the power of one person, A Washington, a Lincoln, King, Mandela, and even a young girl from Pakistan, Malala. One person can change the world by giving people hope. So if you want to change the world, start singing when you're up to your neck and mud. Finally, in seal training there's a bell, a brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit, all you have to do to quit is ring the bell. ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o'clock.

Ring the bell and you no longer have to be in the freezing cold swims. Ring the bell and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT, and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training. All you have to do is ring the bell to get out. If you want to change the world, don't ever, ever ring the bell. It will not be easy, and what started here will indeed have changed the world for the better. Thank you very much. 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, you know, 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. Yeah.

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, you know, African Americans, we had, you know, Polish friends, 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 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. So you better get out of my way now. Oh, you better get out of my way. I was a midshipment here going through the Naval ROTC program, and 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 of 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 at 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 decisions 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, it kind of so's 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, 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 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, General I used to work for talked 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 seal 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. It's, 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, 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 mean, 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 shell.

It was just a bed. Iraq 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 combat. 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 and it I mean in again hard to kind of square the circle on why that's the case but when it when you open the room and the bed is made there's a sense of order and I've told folks look it it's a

simple task but I really do think it it makes a difference certainly makes a difference for me It's just that kind of, that kind of suits the soul. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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.