The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Most Replayed Moment: Your Excuses Will Destroy You, To Be Disciplined Is To Be Free!

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Jocko Willink is a former US Navy SEAL commander, leadership consultant, and bestselling author known for his work on discipline, responsibility, and leadership under pressure. In this moment, Jocko challenges how most people think about discipline, balance, and personal responsibility, arguing that what might sound restrictive is actually a powerful source of freedom, clarity, and direction. Listen to the full episode here: Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/0tKcIMNBC0b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/mqo8YXQBC0b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Jocko Willink: https://jocko.com/

We just got back from Davos in Switzerland, this snowy village where some of the world's leading experts, CEOs, founders, world leaders gather in this one space. And while I was there, my colleague Juan, was telling me about something he does, which many of my friends do. They list their properties when they go away on Airbnb. So many of us, when we go away, we leave our house as this dormant asset that's doing nothing for us other than racking up bills. And as some of you might know, Airbnb are one of our show partners. And I've stayed in their properties all over the world and continues to do so. but I've never actually hosted one of my properties on there.

But when I heard this, it got me thinking, what a smart move it is to make money from an asset that's currently probably costing you money. Every time you're away, your home sits empty. And what Juan told me is how easy it was to get set up. He makes his home available for specific dates so that his guests always depart the day before he gets home. So if you're trying to find an easy way to make some extra money on the side,

hosting on Airbnb might be exactly that, especially if you move around a lot. Your home might be worth more than you think. and you can find out how much your home is worth by going to Airbnb.ca slash host. And at 19 years old, you applied to be a Navy SEAL. Okay, so I have to ask a very dumb question here, which is what is a Navy SEAL? So there's special operations, which I guess, you know, from England, this is the SAS and the SBS. So those are the two sort of units that we get compared to the most.

And so a Navy SEAL is it part of the Navy, but you're the special operations component of the Navy. And the term SEAL is actually an acronym, which stands for sea, air, and land. Because even though we're in the Navy, we are trained to operate in the sea, in the air. So in the sea, meaning we dive, in the air, meaning we parachute and rappel.

and then on the land, meaning we conduct land warfare operations. And you take all those things, combine them together, and that's what our job consists of. I was under the assumption that to become a Navy SEAL ought to be in the SAS, you had to have 10, 20 years of military service. You had to have an established military service, and then you get some like pop-up on your computer, and it says, like, come to this building over here.

And so to hear that you applied at 19 years old, I was like, oh, I don't know teenagers could apply. Yeah, no, I was 18 years old when I joined the Navy, and I joined on a contract that got me sent to seal training, and it took a year to get through, so I was 19 when I finished that up. But there is always debates about, well, don't you want someone that's more experienced?

And I actually loved the fact that I was basically raised in the SEAL teams. It was just awesome. It was an awesome way to grow up. It was an awesome way to spend those years of your life learning the trade that you wanted to learn. And so I thought it was awesome. and I think it worked out pretty well. There is a, usually the percentage of people that make it through seal training is about 20%.

People that are under the age of 20, it goes down to about 5%. So, yeah, I was one of those small percentage of people that are very young but still make it through. And what is the characteristics that they're ultimately testing with the design of that training? What are they testing for? Will you keep going? in the face of whatever. Well, they call one of the weeks hell week, don't they? So they try and simulate hell by the sounds of it.

Yeah, they try and simulate hell. They actually were trying to simulate combat initially. When they created that week, they wanted to take as much combat simulation from World War II at the time and put it into a very compressed schedule so they could create these frogmen to go overseas and conduct operations because World War II was going on. And so they needed to compress the training cycle.

So they compressed a bunch of that combat simulation into, it's about five and a half days, no sleep, lots of physical activity, lots of stress, lots of pain, and lots of people quit. How many people quit in that particular week? I would say most of the people that quit, probably of... It's probably 80% of the quitters quit in that week.

It's been long discussed. I think there's a book called Grit, where they discuss what it takes in terms of character traits to get through these kinds of endurance tasks. And people often think it's those that have the biggest muscles or that do the most, I don't know, cardiovascular exercise. But from what you've observed, and this is maybe a broader point about adversity in life,

is there any similarities in the people that are able to get themselves through adversity? There's some internal drive that you either have or you don't have. And if you have it, you won't quit. And if you don't have it, you're going to quit. And it breaks people. The other thing is you might be an exceptional swimmer and you might be exceptional upper body strength, but you're not that fast runner.

They're going to find that out. Or you might be a fast runner but a bad swimmer. They're going to find out what your weakness is. You might not like the cold. They're going to see it. you might not like the boat on your head. They're going to see it. They might see that you have a bad temper.

They're going to find that and they're going to pick that thing to either make you come out the other side or make you quit. It's a pretty amazing thing. It's a pretty amazing thing. It's a pretty profound thing to look at from the outside and see it. Because when I was going through it, it was just sort of, I was young. I didn't care. I was going to do it.

There was nothing that they were going to tell me that was going to make me quit. I never thought about quitting. If they told me to get back in the water again, let's go. They told me to put that log on my shoulder. Let's go. Put the boat on my head. Let's go. I didn't care.

Can you teach that? Let's go. We're going to jump back in the water. Let's go. I think that's one of the few things that you learn in basic seal training is to shrug your shoulders and go forward. Like one of the things they do is They'll line you up on the ocean And this is in California

And sometimes people think that California Is nice warm water But it's not It's 55 degrees And I don't know what that translates to In centigrade but it's cold And one of the things they do is They'll line you up

And they say interlock arms And you get arm and arm with the guy next year And they say forward march And you march in the water And they say take seats And you sit down And they leave you in there And it's called surf torture

And you just sit there and they'll, after a while, they'll pull you up out of the water, they'll line you up, and the doctor will come down and see if anyone has hypothermia. And if no one has hypothermia or signs of hypothermia yet, get back in the water. And they just keep doing that. And so, yeah, it's, what you learn to do is, okay, I'm going to go forward. There's no, I can't get out of this. I'm going to go forward.

I'm not going to quit. So I'm going to go forward. Bring it on. And I think if there's anything that you learn, it's to, to, to, keep pushing through things that suck. And I would love to say like, oh, keep pushing through adversity, but this isn't adversity. This is just things that suck.

It's one level below adversity. Adversity is when you're having a challenge. This is just something that's going to suck, and you're going to have to push through it. You talked about the role that having a Y plays, and I was thinking about, you know, if I'd just lost my girlfriend or someone, I'd gone through some severe rejection,

or someone in my life had died, and my parting, promise to them was I was going to do this. The role that having some kind of reason to carry on plays in how we handle adversity or things that suck, have you seen any patterns in that? Is it important? Because there's books behind me that literally say start with your why and those kinds of things. Yeah. And, you know, that's anything from, oh, my girlfriend dumped me and I'm going to prove her wrong to something that much more significant, which is my girlfriend died and I told her I was going to do this and I'm going to do it for her.

Both those things, depending on the human being, can be a strong enough, a strong enough why to get through. And I have friends that were, I have one friend that was in the Vietnam. He was in Vietnam. And when he showed up to seal training, he didn't know what it was. He thought he was volunteering to be like a diver, a diver that would do construction under boats. He thought that what it was. And so he showed up and they're like, this is seal training.

He's like, well, it's a seal. And they kind of explained it to him. And then he went and made it through. All that torture, all that mayhem. And why? Because that was what they were telling him to do. And he was, okay, that's what we're doing. Let's go.

So again, I would love to be able to, you know, give you this profound anchor that people need to have. But it's like, oh, do you want to do this or not? Which is what I think a lot of it boils down to. Do you actually want to do this or not? Do you actually want to do this or not? because if you actually want to do it, what's going to stop you? Nothing.

And if you don't really want to do it, what's going to stop you? Just about anything that comes up. Just about any obstacle it gets in your way becomes an excuse. It becomes a reason. It comes a rationale for not proceeding down that path. And this is interesting too.

When you talk to people that went to seal training that didn't make it, most of the time, it's some reason. There's a medical reason there's a family problem. There's very few people that look at you and say, oh, I quit because it sucked. Which is what, by the way, which is what happens

to the vast majority of people. The vast majority of people that don't make it through seal training, and by this I mean 80, 90% of the people that don't make it through seal training, they didn't make it through because they quit. Then there's a small percentage that had a medical problem, and then there's a small percentage that got performance dropped, meaning they couldn't perform the runs, the swims,

the technical aspects of the job and they failed and they get dropped. But the vast majority of people, they quit, but they don't usually say that. And even in their mind, they probably don't believe it. They probably believe, well, you know, it was my leg. And once my leg was hurting, I knew I was going to have a hard time on the runs. I wasn't going to be able to make the runs. That's why I quit. But it wasn't really quitting.

It was because my leg. So it's like I said, it's a very, it's a very strange and really kind of a a mystical thing. Excuses. You're talking there about people making excuses. What have you come to learn about the nature of excuses

and if they are our friends, our enemies, if they're ever useful? Your excuses will destroy you and take everything that you ever wanted from you if you let them. Doesn't sound like a friend.

No, it's definitely not a friend. It's definitely not a friend. It can seem like a friend. Just like your friend that keeps feeding you drinks at the bar can seem like a friend. But are they really helping you? you in any way, shape, or form? No, they're not. They're not. So when your excuses make you feel a little

bit better about the fact that you didn't execute on what you needed to execute on, then they can make you feel better. But they're not helping you. They're not helping you at all. Is that when you think about extreme ownership, which is the title of this book here in front of me, is our excuses the opposite, excuses and blame? Is that the opposite of extreme ownership? That is the opposite of extreme ownership. Extreme ownership is this went wrong, this failed, didn't accomplish this, and it's not the fault of my boss, it's not the fault of my girlfriend, it's not the fault of my parents, it's not the fault of the weather, it's my fault.

And I'm going to take ownership of it, and I'm going to fix it. That's what extreme ownership is. And this is a very difficult thing to do because it hurts. because when you look around at your life and you look around at your job and your financial situation and your relationship and your physical health and when you look at all those things

and all the problems that you may have with those things and you say the reason I have all those problems is because of me that can hurt. That can sting. And a lot of times our ego rejects that and makes excuses and lies.

and then we don't have to change anything, and then nothing changes. If someone was on the extreme end of that disease of excuse and blame and all of those things, is there anything that you could do or you would advise them to do to kind of walk back from there, to get over the other side? Because I think we can all think of people in our lives, and maybe even ourselves at times, who have gotten into a chronic pattern of using excuses and blame as a form of self-defense because we don't want to turn that mirror. back at us and have to confront reality.

Like I think sometimes, if I think about some of my closest friends, those that have the lowest self-esteem will use excuses and blame the most because it's, you know, personal responsibility might not, in the short term at least, do anything for my already low self-esteem. So I'm going to blame the world as self-defense. What's step one to get out of that? Well, unfortunately, what happens a lot, and you may or may not have seen this, but I would assume you've seen this at some point of your life.

People, and this is a term, there's a term, it's rock bottom, right? This is a term that we hear for someone that's addicted, someone that's an alcoholic, someone that's physically let themselves go, someone that's put themselves into a situation with their finances or their work or whatever, where they reach rock bottom. and that rock bottom, what happens is you've, I believe what rock bottom is, is as you look around all the excuses that you've made, they're not there anymore. And so now what rock bottom is, you realize that this problem, whether it's alcohol, whether it's your finances, the problem is you.

And normally or hopefully in the best case scenario, rock bottom is the beginning of the upward climb, the upward path. sometimes rock rock bottom leads to disaster and complete abandonment of hope but when it when it when the excuses all go away and people can actually confront the fact that this is all because of me and this is it hurts but is also unbelievably empowering because if these problems are because of me then i'm of fixing these problems. So even though extreme ownership hurts and is painful, it's also liberating because now you have control over your fate and over your destiny,

and that is a glorious thing. Discipline is freedom. The title of your book here, Discipline equals freedom. Now that seems like it's untrue because when people think of discipline, they think of rigidity and taking away. their freedom, having to be disciplined. Why is, why does discipline equal freedom? Because the more discipline you have in your life, the more freedom you will end up with. So if you lack the discipline

to exercise and eat healthy, you will end up being a slave to disease. If you lack the discipline to work hard, save your money, you will end up a slave to finances. If you lack the discipline to manage your time correctly, you will end up with no free time. If you have self-discipline, if you have the discipline to save your money and work hard and invest your money properly,

if you have the discipline to manage your time correctly and not waste a bunch of time, if you have the discipline to exercise and eat healthy, you will end up with freedom. And I know it's a counterintuitive, it's contrarian, but I've seen this over and over and over again. If you want freedom in your life, you have to have discipline. There's going to be some kid listening to this now. I always think about the personas that are listening. and they are, you know, eating Doritos off their belly. Spit them out.

Spit them out. Start now. Because if you're a kid right now and you're eating Doritos off your belly, I know they taste good and there's some immediate gratification. And I get that. But I'm going to tell you it starts right now. Throw that bag of Doritos away. Get rid of it. Go do some push-ups.

Go spend $12 at the hardware store and hang up pull-up bar in your room and start doing pull-ups. And if you can't do one pull-up, hang on that bar. And you're going to start to get a little bit stronger. You can just start to get a little bit healthier. You're going to start to get more focused. You're going to start to become more resilient. And you're going to start to be able to do a pull-up and you're going to start to eat healthy all the time. And you're going to start to understand the world better. And you're going to start to progress in every aspect of your life. And you'll see that if you have that kind of discipline right now,

you're going to end up with freedom. And if you don't have that kind of discipline and you keep eating those Doritos and you don't work hard and you don't exercise and you don't apply yourself, you're going to end up, you're going to end up shackled. You're going to up shackled by a boss that you don't like, doing a job that you don't like to do,

with sicknesses and diseases that you don't want, relying on people that you can't even count on, alone. And you don't have to. But if you have discipline, if you have discipline, you will attain freedom. And it starts with just spitting the Doritos out. Starts with spitting the Doritos out. Yes, indeed.

One of the things you do, which is, I mean, you're super famous for it, is this idea of waking up early. Now, I'm not someone that way. wakes up early. I know you, no alarm clock and you're usually up by 11. So no meetings before 11. Okay. Got it. Got it. So I stay up quite late. Yep.

What's the best case you could give me for changing that? And do I need to change that? Because what I do is, you know, I flew into LA. I'm fucking jet lagged. I'm flying back in a couple of days. I'm going to be jet lagged when I land as well. So what I'm trying to do is just protect my sleep at all costs because I've come to learn that it's really the foundation of my performance. So if I'm unslept and I show up at work, the chance that I'm not going to show up correctly

in a variety of ways, emotionally, creatively, whatever, is high and that for me is the greatest risk. So in the last sort of year or two of my life, I've just said, okay, prioritize sleep, because then everything else seems to follow. But when I heard that you wake up sometimes at 4.45 or 4.30, like pretty much all the time.

And I've literally seen you on social media, upload your alarm clock day after day after day. Okay, shit, maybe I should rethink. No, I think if you're, if you've got a system that's working well for you, and then I wouldn't change anything, right? If you feel like you're performing well, you're physically healthy, you're getting all the work done that you need to do, you're a naturally more of a late night, late morning type person, I'd run with it. It's, if you were telling me, yeah, sometimes I get up, sometimes I don't, sometimes I work late,

sometimes I don't. I'm not, don't work out every day. You know, sometimes I feel groggy. If you were telling me that kind of thing, I'd say, okay, pick a time and start waking up at that time every day. It doesn't have to be 4.40. It could be 8 o'clock, could be 7 o'clock. It doesn't matter.

Could be 11 o'clock. But try and go to bed around the same time and try and wake up around the same time. And that's going to be a great foundation for everything that you're doing. And I would say when you wake up in the morning, do some kind of exercise. Because I think that is very helpful. in getting your day started correctly.

What are your non-negotiables in your life in terms of habits, routines, disciplines? I wake up early and I work out every day. That's kind of my, that's, those are the minimum requirements in my life. Train jiu-jitsu. I don't get to train jih Train jih Tren jih Tijuana every single day, but if I can train jih Tren Jiu-Sitsu, I'm going to train jih T-Jitsu. I'm going to work out every day. day. If I can surf, I'm going to surf, you know. I obviously have to work every day. I work every day doing something. You know, I've got a bunch of different companies. I got to write books,

podcasts, so I work every day. Are you ever undisciplined? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Chocolate chip cookies. They're a discipline lapse for me. Yeah, so yeah, I'm not a cyborg. Struggle sucks. Depends on how you frame it, right? Depends on how you frame it. Because I'm thinking about you stood at the beach, you know, and they say walk out, jocco, link arms and walk out. You described that as sucking.

Yeah. But what you're also saying is there's huge value in things that suck. On the other side of something that sucks is something worth cherishing. I would say not just huge value. but the value. The value. You want to know if you're a, you're talking about young men that might not have any direction right now,

go do something that's hard. Go try and accomplish something that's hard. You may win, you may lose, you may succeed, you may fail. I'll tell you what, you'll be better. If you avoid those things that are hard, if you don't accept that challenge, If you don't step up and step into that cold water and you sit on your couch and eat Doritos, I can tell you this is not a good move.

This is not a good move. Don't do that. Don't do that. Just get up. Move towards that challenge, whatever that challenge is. Move towards that challenge and go attack it. And you may be successful and you may not be successful, but you will be better. and the next challenge you're going to be more prepared for

and the next challenge after that you're going to be even more prepared for and you're going to fail and you're going to fail and you're going to fail and you're going to fail and you're going to win and that's life life without those challenges it's just existence don't just exist go live what you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode,

I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you. I just got back from Davos in Switzerland, this snowy village where some of the world's leading experts, CEOs, founders, world leaders gather in this one space. And while I was there, my colleague Juan, was telling me about something he does,

which many of my friends do. They list their properties when they go away on Airbnb. So many of us, when we go away, we leave our house as this dormant asset that's doing nothing for us other than racking up bills. And as some of you might know, IBM are one of our show partners. And I've stayed in their properties all over the world and continued to do so. But I've never actually hosted one of my properties on there.

But when I heard this, it got me thinking, what a smart move it is to make money from an asset that's currently probably costing you money. Every time you're away, your home sits empty. And what Juan told me is how easy it was to get set up. He makes his home available for specific dates so that his guests always depart the day before he gets home. So if you're trying to find an easy way to make some extra money on the side. Hosting on Airbnb might be exactly that, especially if you

move around a lot. Your home might be worth more than you think. And you can find out how much your home is worth by going to Airbnb.ca slash host.