The Jordan Harbinger Show - 608: Jocko Willink | The Winning Example of Extreme Ownership

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

Jocko Willink (@jockowillink), commander for the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War, joins the show to talk about taking responsibility, discipline, intensity, and leadership to the next level as outlined in Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. [Note: This is a previously broadcast episode from the vault that we felt deserved a fresh pass through your earholes!] What We Discuss with Jocko Willink: When making a decision, worrying about variables that can’t be controlled is a waste of time. A better outcome is likely if we learn to focus that wasted effort on factors that can be controlled. Understand why taking ownership of your mistakes, personal issues, and outcomes gets better results than trying to pass the blame to someone else. What does discipline = freedom mean? How do you stop small weaknesses that sometimes permeate discipline from having a negative impact on significant decisions? Is there such a thing as a natural leader? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/608 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our conversation with accidental international poker champion and human motivation expert Maria Konnikova? Catch up with episode 371: Maria Konnikova | Pulling Off the Biggest Bluff here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. I don't worry about the things that I can't control. And if I go out and get blown up, then that's what happened. I mitigate as much as I can, and then I'm not going to worry about it. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional neuroscientist, music mogul, or drug trafficker,

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it when you do that. Today, one from the vault recorded several years back. It's really funny for me to re-listen to these sometimes. It's a, well, it makes me cringe, but hopefully you'll enjoy it. We're talking with my friend Jaka Willink, seal and former commander of task unit bruiser in Iraq, Baghdad and Ramadi to be specific. This guy, many of you know him well. Goes without saying he is the real deal. He's been a friend of mine for several years now. Let's just say he's known for his intensity. This is a good person to know, a good person to listen to and a great person to learn from. His first book is extreme ownership, taking extreme levels of responsibility in your organization and in your life, it was a game changer for me for thousands of others the same and is brilliant in its simplicity.

Now today, how to own absolutely everything in our world and how this has changed the way that I live. It's also changed the way that I do business. I love it. I can't recommend it enough. Jocko's not so bad himself. We also discuss discipline, intensity, leadership, and a little bit of violence on this episode of the show. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators, performers every single week. It's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. This course is about improving your networking and connection skills and inspiring others to develop a personal and professional relationship with you. It'll make you a better

networker, a better connector, and a better thinker. That's all free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests you hear on the show, they subscribe and contribute to the course already, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Jocko Willink. Tell us what you do in one sentence, or what you used to do, maybe. Well, what I used to do is I was in the military for 20 years.

And when I got done being in the military, retired, then I went and tried to take the lessons that I had learned in the military and teaching to people that were not in the military. That's what I do. During your time in the military, commander for seal task unit, bruiser, what's a task unit?

What does that mean? Task unit in the SEAL team. is basically two platoons worth of seals, so maybe 35 or 40 plus or minus seals, and then a bunch of support people that take care of your radios, provide intelligence, fix your weapons, fix your Humvees, keep the camp running.

Well, with Task Unit Bruiser, we probably had 60 or 70 of those support people and then 35 or 40 seals. So there's more support people than actual seals. That makes sense. You've got a lot of gear, a lot of stuff going on. The amount of uncertainty that you guys deal with when you're out there seems like it would drive most people insane. There's definitely uncertainty out there, but I think the world is filled with uncertainty, regardless of whether you're in combat or whether you're in the business world or whether you're trying to raise kids.

Sure. Or whatever you're doing, there's going to be uncertainty. I think the difference, though, might be that here in civilian life, we think we can control the uncertainty, but you're acutely aware that you cannot. And also, it's maybe more lethal. The lethal uncertainty we have here are things like, oh, you might get in a car accident later. And that's probably the most common sort of uncertain occurrence that we can't control that we think we have control of

because we're controlling the vehicle. But when you're out there, you're kind of like, all right, people are actively trying to kill us. We don't know where it's going to come from. Everything is suspicious. Everyone who we don't know could be suspicious. And every little trash can that's too close to the street is suspicious. How do you manage the base level of anxiety

that you would have with that? or do you train it out of everyone somehow? Well, for me, I can only speak from my own experience, but there's things, as you said, there's things that you can control and there's things that you cannot control. So, for instance, an IED, which for those of you that don't know,

you mentioned it, trash on the street, which the reason you said that, you obviously have some experience or knowledge is that the enemy in Iraq would camouflage IEDs, booby traps, homemade bombs on the side of the road, and they would camouflage them with a piece of track. It wasn't just a piece of trash because eventually they made it look like a curb and they made it look like a mailbox. They made it look like a wall or they'd put it in a dead animal.

So that's everything. You become suspicious of everything. So what you do on things that you can and cannot control, if you can't control them, then I'm not going to worry about them. I can do, I can mitigate as much risk as possible. I can pay attention. We can look at briefs and understand what the camouflage of an IED is going to look like and I can learn as much as I can. and we can plan a route that is as safe as possible. And then beyond those things that we can do to mitigate the risk,

there's nothing we can do. So I don't worry about the things that I can't control. And if I go out and get blown up, then that's what happened. I mitigate as much as I can, and then I'm not going to worry about it. So you're able to compartmentalize the worrying into things that you can actually control? Yes. How would you teach a civilian to do that? People around here, Silicon Valley, even probably in this very building,

and there's people worrying nonstop about things that they absolutely cannot control and can never control. Well, so many things that when I do teach people, I'm less teaching them than I am just making them aware of the fact. Because once you come aware of the fact that there's things that you can't control, and if you worry about them,

you're actually expending effort, worrying about something that you can't control anyways, so it's doing you no good to worry. So why not take that effort and focus on things that you can control and things that will improve your chances and make your chances of survival better? Why not just shift and focus on that?

Once people become aware of that, then it's not that hard to do. Because you're expending your energy in one direction. Instead of trying to bottle it in, I think the way that a lot of people try to control worry is they bottle it up. They go, okay, I'm not going to worry about that. And they freak out, and there's that energy that's going to leak out somewhere. And usually that shows up as anxiety. If we're focusing on only what we can control, then we go, all right, well, I'm just going to double down on making sure my gear is working. The car is full of gas or whatever.

My body's in good shape. I've got to change underwear in the trunk, whatever it is, rather than, And what if I don't get the job later and they're but chewing their nails off about that? Exactly. Are you going to be nervous and you're going to be afraid and you're going to have fear? That's okay. But as you said, what you want to do is you want to take that nervous energy and that fear and utilize it to do something positive that's going to improve your situation as opposed to just expending

that fear and nervousness worrying and getting paranoid and working yourself to where you can't sleep. So now you're not well rested when you go out in an operation, which is going to affect you in a negative way. So just take those things, shift them towards something positive, and you're going to be much better off. Now, in the book, the book Extreme Ownership, which will link to in the show notes, that left a powerful imprint. And I started using some of what you wrote right away, and it made an immediate difference in both my business and personal life. Because the concept behind the book seems really deceptively simple. It's just own all the mistakes, own all of your personal issues,

own all of the outcomes that you end up with from your team or from your business. In practice, it can be really hard to do. I was talking with Jen earlier about somebody we know who works for a big company, multinational company, and some project went south somehow. That person wrote an email that said,

well, we know Tim didn't get the deliverable done in time. And I had just read the book and I thought, oh, that's literally the opposite of what you need to do. I don't know this is fact, but I assume this person now has an enemy in the company that cannot wait for her to go down. You embarrass somebody.

You also showed everybody else who's looking that you're going to do that to them if they screw up so they're going to avoid working with you in case they make a mistake? And furthermore, if you're the boss and you're looking at this person that had the project fail and the first thing they do is say, well, Tim didn't get the deliverable done. That's why it's their fault. If I'm your boss and you tell me that Jen didn't do what she's supposed to do and that's why you're part of the project failed, I'm not mad at Jen.

No. I'm actually disgusted in you. First of all, because you didn't lead Jen correctly. You didn't give her the equipment she needed or the gear she needed or the training that you needed. When all that happened and went wrong, you just blamed her, didn't take any responsibility for it yourself. So I'm now lost trust in you as well, and we've got an issue that's going to cause problems in the future. I'd love to talk more about that in a little bit as well. I think the person who recommended the book to me originally was like, oh, you probably don't even need to read that.

Just get the summary where it tells you basically just accept responsibility for everything. But it's not really the point of the book, and we can get into some of the nuance stuff later. but it's funny and interesting how deep the rabbit hole goes with the concept of extreme ownership because you end up becoming so much more respected, even when you're taking ownership of someone else's mistakes. It's completely counterintuitive in a lot of ways, which I thought was fascinating because it's hard to take that first step and say, all right, I'm going to own the mistake that this other person on my team made because what that person was thinking, what Jen and I's mutual friend was, of course, thinking was, I don't want to get in trouble for this. I'm not getting

fired over this. And ironically, she's much more likely to get in trouble over someone else's mistake now that she's been the one who called attention to it. There's a lot of benefit that comes from it that's hidden as well, not just psychologically in your own head, but even organizationally, the ripple effect is incredible. We can deep dive into that in a bit. I have to say that reading the book, one thing that was funny is you guys use about a thousand times more PowerPoint than I ever envisioned special forces guys using. I never imagined these elite badasses using PowerPoint and having and a clicker and like the paperclip guy pops up. He's like, do you need help?

Not unless you know where Osama bin Laden is. We don't need any help. How do we get rid of this thing? Yeah, we actually went overboard with it. You know, that's one of the chapters in the book of where we had guys that were, instead of thinking, they were putting slides together. Yeah.

And that's not a place you want to be. No. You want to use your brain, not your mouse pad. It seems like it would be really easy to get caught up in the details of something like that. Rather than focus on the problem, You have this built-in distraction where, well, I don't know how we're going to extract everyone if something goes south over here. But you know what? Let's get a higher resolution photo of this area.

Let's color this in and make the background white so people can see it. And then you're looking at it and going, wait, I didn't solve the problem at all. But it seems like you're doing work. It goes back to kind of the anxiety. Worrying about things you can't control, you get this anxiety. You've got to have the outlet somewhere. But if you don't direct the energy, it's a waste. Yeah, so what do you look to control?

You look to control the fonts on your slide. which, as you pointed out, do not matter. What matters is do we have a good plan that everybody on the team understands fully that we can go out and execute in an efficient manner? That's what's important. I often see you tweet things like Discipline equals freedom,

which sounds a little bit like an oxymoron. Can you explain that a little bit? Because it sounds to a lot of people, especially I'm talking to Younger Jordan right now in my own head and I'm thinking, discipline is the opposite of freedom. How does that click together? And don't you wish younger,

Jordan could have seen the light, because I know I wish younger Jocko would have seen the light. Definitely. Because we all want freedom. And, you know, we want to have financial freedom. We want to have more free time. That's what everybody wants. And when you want that freedom, the way to get there is through discipline. The two examples that I use all the time are the ones I just said, which is financial freedom.

If you want to have financial freedom, how do you get more financial freedom? You have to have financial discipline. If you want more free time, how do you get more free time? you have a more disciplined time management schedule. That is the pathway to freedom is discipline. And that's why I always say discipline equals freedom. And it's not just for individuals. I mean, those two examples are individuals, but as a business or as a team, the more disciplined you are, the more freedom you're going to have. So with my task unit, with my seal up platoons that I was in, we were highly disciplined and had all kinds of standard operating procedures about how we did

everything. Everything had a standard operating procedure. How we got into vehicles, how we got out of vehicles, how we lined up on buildings, how we left buildings, how we talked on the radio. Everything we did had a procedure. And you might think that that constrained us on the battlefield, but it actually gives you more freedom on the battlefield because if I needed you to go take down a building, I could say, Jordan, go hit that building over there. And you could just immediately go and do it. You didn't have to tell me how you were going to do it. You didn't have to tell me how many people you were going to take. You didn't have to tell me what you're going to do with any unknown people that you found in there. You didn't have to tell me what you're going to do with any wounded.

we already knew all that. So you could just go do it. Not only did I know what you were going to do, but all your team, your subordinates, all knew those things as well. They knew the basic plan. They knew the standard operating procedures. So you could just do it.

So that gave me all kinds of freedom on the battlefield because I could say, Jordan, go hit that building over there. And I could say, Jen, you need to go hit that building and you could take your team and do it as well. So that's why discipline equals freedom, not just as an individual, but as a team as well. Do you have kids?

Yes, I do. How do you teach them things like this without just yelling at them and being like a regular dad all the time. It's the same way you try and teach any other human being that you're working with in the world. And that is you try and show them. Yeah, you beat them to death with PowerPoint. No, what you do is you try and make them understand why you're doing what you're doing. And that's the same when you're leading any team,

whether it's your kids or whether it's something at work or whether it's something in the military. You want your team to understand why you're doing what you're doing, what the benefit is going to be, where it's going to put you in the long run, what the benefits are going to be, how it ties back, from the team benefits back to the individual benefits. If we're working on a project for our team, I want you to see how it's going to benefit the team, but then I want you to also see how once it benefits the team, it's going to benefit you in the long run, because we succeed with this project. Now we've got more product to sell, and now you as a salesperson is going to be able

to sell more product because you're going to have more options to offer to people. You want to tie that thread all the way back through. What about your kids in terms of the military? Do they think about going in? Do you want them to go in? You don't have any expectations there? I don't have any expectations. I don't want to place any pressure on them to make any decisions in life. I want them to understand the world the best they can and make decisions based on what they think they should do. I know that I have one son and three daughters. I would say my son is fairly interested in going in the military. And I think my daughters are actually weighing whether it might be a good option for them as well. So I'm completely open if they want to go in the

military or if they want to go and be street artists, whatever they're going to go choose to do. I will wish them the best of luck and provide them with whatever support I can until they're 18 years old, in which case they are then on their own. You mentioned weakness and being mentally weak for the moment creeping into discipline and being the thing that ruins it. You kind of analogize this to if you have the discipline to getting out of bed, you win. You pass the test. How do you stop the small weaknesses transitioning, I should say, into affecting more significant decisions? How do you stop the small weaknesses. Yeah, do you plug that as soon as you spot it or do you try to prevent it somehow? You stop the small weaknesses. It's a circular thing. This is not some epic, biblical,

crazy theory to put out. If you have weaknesses, then you stop them. That's it. Basically, you cultivate discipline by getting rid of the weaknesses. You get rid of the weaknesses by exercising the discipline that you've cultivated. And I talk about getting out of bed in the morning because to just about everybody being in bed in the morning feels good. It's warm, you're tired. Hitting the snooze button is a very real temptation that everybody can relate to. That's why I talk about all the time. So instead of hitting the snooze button, just get up and get out of bed.

That's it. And that discipline decision, next thing you know you're in the gym, you're working out. And that discipline decision, next thing you know, when it comes to breakfast, instead of eating donuts. A maple bar? Something like that, right? Eclare. Those things. Instead of eating those things, you're eating a piece of beef jerky or you're having a cup of tea or you're just drinking a glass of water and doing an intermittent fast. And then when you get done with that, now you sit down to work and you're feeling like you're on the right path. And so you say, you know what, I'm going to knock this stuff out. So then you start working and you work harder. You know, I've heard some of this talk about the fact that your will, it dissipates through the day and it weakens through the day. And I actually disagree with that. I think that your discipline and your will grow. stronger as you exercise them, even through the day.

Even throughout the day. So starting off right, maybe starts you off with a bigger tank or just keeps things propelled upwards instead of just wearing you down. I think it gets you on the right track and it feels bad to step off the track. Yeah, that's for sure. There's psychological pressure to not top off a day where you worked out, ran, got up early, ate healthy with an extra large pizza. You know how crappy that's going to feel and it outweighs the feeling that you're going

to get by eating it. Exactly. Yeah, I can definitely identify with that. I was surprised to find, I've talked to a lot of SEALs and special forces, special operators especially, and there's always this error of humility that originally before I started spending a lot of time with guys like that, guys like you, I thought it was a little bit fake. Like maybe this is something they're taught and they got to do it because otherwise they seem really almost aggressively capable. And I think a lot of people wouldn't like that, maybe in a structure like the military. But I don't think it's fake anymore. I think it's real and there's a lot of fake motivation, there's a lot of fake humility

in the world in general, but you can't really fake a lot of the things that you guys have to deal with, like bravery. You can't fake bravery because courage in the face of danger is essentially what bravery really actually is. And so I think that that permeates the whole mindset of the special forces, or at least the ones that I've met and dealt with. It seems unusual to me that there would be entire units in all branches that seem to grab hold of this mindset and never let it go. And maybe I just met the right seals and the right special forces guys. Can you sort of point to a time in your life

where obviously you probably were young and feeling your oats at one point. You went through the military and then at some point things turned and you went, I don't have to front like this anymore. I don't have to do this crap anymore or act tougher than I am or act holier than now or put on airs anymore.

Do you remember that process at all? For one thing, combat is extremely humbling. And anybody that's been in legit combat for a sustained period of time, is not going to walk out of it feeling like Superman, because if you are in enough combat, there's going to be situations where you were not in control, where things got out of control,

where the enemy did something you didn't expect, where your man got wounded or killed, when you go through that, you're going to be humble. So I don't think there's any faking it. I think it's just real. Yeah, well, one, I've never been in combat. And two, to have somebody with so much capability, be so down to earth,

especially when I lived in L.A. I didn't, you don't meet a whole lot of people who have a lot of capability and qualification and are also extremely humble. So it came out of nowhere for me, and I was very surprised by that. For you, what was the draw to the teams into special operations in the first place? Ever since I was a little kid, the only thing I remember wanting to do was be a commando of some kind. And so at some point I figured out the SEAL teams was one of the hardest ones.

And that's the one I decided to go. Also, I like the water. I grew up in the water. Oh, okay. And so the SEALs was maritime-oriented special operations, so it was an easy pick for me. Even extreme athletes and things like that that go for or SEALs, it's the water that you hear about the most that gasses people out

or intimidates them or scares them or just makes them ring the bell during buds because there's just an element to trudging through the water. Maybe it's the salt, maybe it's just the water itself or the cold, probably a combination of all those. Now that I'm thinking about it, that just makes it so uncomfortable. So the water is an absolute differentiator because it is. It's cold. It's uncomfortable. It destroys things. So radios, weapons, intelligence gear, maps, it just destroys everything that you have. If you're going to operate in the water, you have to be able to do it a little bit smarter, a little bit better. And so that's

what the seal teams get used to. And so when we've been fighting these wars in the desert and we get to drive in on a truck or come on a helicopter and you're completely dry when you get off and start your mission, it makes a lot easier than what you're used to in the SEAL teams growing up, getting out of a boat, getting into a smaller boat, getting out of a smaller boat and swimming across the beach, coming across the beach with your gear covered in sand and all messed up from that and learning how to waterproof that, fix it if it does leak. It's just all kinds of problem. The water is a real challenge in combat, in any situation, the water is a good test. It seems like, and it seems like after all that water and then finally flying somewhere on a helicopter,

it's kind of like flying first class. Oh, we didn't have to swim there? This is great. I'm ready. Do you consider yourself a natural leader? Is there such a thing? I think there is such a thing. Matter of fact, I know there is such a thing. I mean, I've seen dozens and dozens of seal platoons go through training and some of the people inside those platoons, whether they're in a leadership position or not, they step up and become leaders. I see that in businesses, that some businesses, that some businesses, they have in their organization teams and inside those teams, again, regardless of rank or structure, someone will step up and be a leader. So there's absolutely people that have more natural leadership ability than others. I hear people say that leaders are born and not made. And some

people say leaders are made and not born. And I think it's a little bit of a combination of both because there's some people that are great leaders. And when they start learning about leadership and they start focusing on it, they become even better. There's some people that are okay leaders that become really good leaders. There's some people that are bad leaders that become okay leaders. And there's some people that are bad leaders that never can lead. That's just the reality of it. So I think that you have to have some natural ability, which I think most people do have

some level of natural ability, and then there's some people that don't have it at all. That's a pretty small percentage, but they definitely exist. The untrainable, the uncoachable leader, the person who can never make it, It's rare. It's pretty rare. It's one reason why people are like that. There's one person that's untrainable as a leader, and that's the person that lacks humility, the topic that you already talked about. Because if I come to you and I want to be a leader, but I'm not humble, how can I learn anything? How can I accept your viewpoint on anything? How can I improve in any way? Because I already think I know everything. When we would fire guys from the Seagel teams from leadership positions, 99.9% of the time,

it wasn't because they didn't know how to shoot their gun. It wasn't because they weren't in good physical shape. It wasn't because they weren't a good tactician. It was because they weren't humble, which meant they couldn't listen to anybody, which meant they couldn't take any suggestions, which meant they didn't respect the enemy. Because if I'm not humble, guess what? I don't need to worry about the enemy. Wrong answer. You do need to worry about the enemy. You need to respect the enemy and be thinking about them improving and be thinking about what they're going to do to you to get the edge on you. So when a person lacks humility, that's the biggest issue that I would run into with the CEO leadership that we'd end up firing. That makes sense. Obviously, we have extreme

ownership and the concepts that we're going to get into, but is mostly what you're looking for, charisma? I mean, what have you observed about good leaders that lets you know early on maybe? Like, okay, this guy, we're going to look at this guy. He's probably going to end up being a leader. Yeah, again, I mean, obviously it's the question I just answered or the statement I just made, when you get someone that's a humble person that's ready to listen, that's ready to listen to their subordinates, that's ready to listen to their superiors, that's ready to listen to their training cadre, someone that has that kind of attitude, they're going to do a decent job. They're going to do a decent job. Now, are there some specific traits that will help? Yes, there are. For instance,

and this is a very particular skill set, can you be loud on the battlefield? Can you be heard over the sound of gunfire. If you have a loud voice, that's beneficial. If you don't have a loud voice, again, I'm singling out this one thing. But if you don't have a loud voice, I've seen plenty of leaders that weren't that loud. But guess what? They learned how to work with their team to make sure that they got their word to a couple key people that were loud and then they would spread the word. And so there's ways to overcome these things. As long as they have the humility, you say, you know what, I'm not that loud. I'm going to need some help on this. If they said, you know what, I'm not that loud, so people aren't going to hear me. But what I'm going to do is just lead a different

way that no one's ever seen before because I'm smarter than everybody else. It's not going to work out. There's traits. And again, I think these are all things that people can get better at. People can develop more. The idea of detaching from the chaos and the mayhem, that's a skill set that you can develop. You're not born with that. You might be born with a certain level of it or a lack of it, but you can definitely improve that. If I took you and put you into press or situations for the next five days, you know, had people shooting paintball at you, and I put you in charge of a squad, and I put you into dark rooms where I said, okay, when the lights come on, you got to figure this out. And I did that to you over and over again. In a week, your perspective would change.

And you develop the ability to detach and say, okay, I'm stepping back. Oh, there's people shooting paintball from over there. I'm not going to worry about that right the second. I'm going to assess where my team is. So you would learn the ability to do that. And that's one that almost every human can do that. Almost every human can learn that ability to detach. occasionally people can't. Occasionally people just don't have the mental capacity. They just get too caught up and stuff and too emotional. And that's a person that's going to have a problem. But most people can learn. I'd be covered in paintballs. When I heard you guys train with paintballs, I was just thinking, yeah, I got to ring the bell already because I played that a couple of times.

And I'll tell you, those things, they make you bleed. And I'm thinking, if this is what paintballs feel like, there's a reason guys like you do that job. And I talk to people and listen for a living. Let me put it that way. The toughness element of the guys that you see on the teams is incredible. and even the training that we just read about, which I'm sure is 100 deviations away from what it feels like to be in there is incredible. I'm very curious. We talked about humility and good leaders.

What other traits do bad leaders have in common? Is it just arrogance? Is it just ego that you see most of the time tripping people up? It's all going to stem from arrogance and ego. It's all going to stem from that. Because again, once you're arrogant and your ego's too big, now you can't take coaching. You can't even do a good, honest self-assessment.

Never mind an external coach. You can't even assess yourself and say, you know what, that training mission we just went on, I didn't do a good job. If these are the mistakes I think I made, where I can improve. If you're arrogant, you have a big ego, you never say that. So now you're never making any improvements as a leader and you're not going to be a good leader. It comes down in large part to flexibility, your ability to be flexible in situations, namely your own ego and your own issues being the chief impediment to that flexibility and that

ability to learn from the sound of it. Yes, the ability to be flexible and really that's the ability to adapt and improve and grow. And that's what you need to do in a leadership position. Adapt, improve, and grow. Obviously, you need to do that personally, but then as a leader, you're leading your whole team to do that. And again, when you see an arrogant leader, sometimes they're so blinded by their own arrogance that they think that their team can do no wrong. And now we're not making any improvements

not only as an individual, we're not making any improvements as a team. It's a nightmare. In your situation where the stakes are so high, that's literally a life and death mistake. It is very, very bad. And that's why when we get those leaders coming through, we'd get rid of them. Can you tell us the boat crew story? The book was written by myself and my buddy Laf Babin, who was one of the platoon commanders that worked for me in Ramadi. And this was a chapter that he wrote when he came back from Iraq, he was one of the instructors at SEAL training to make a long story short. In one week of training is called Hell Week, you stay awake for five or six days and you do a bunch of physical evolutions. And while you're doing that, you're divided up into boat crews of seven,

six, seven, eight guys, depending on how many people have quit. And the boat crews race against each other. And of course, in the SEAL teams, it pays to be a winner. So you want to win the races, because if you win the race, you get to rest. If you lose the race, you get punished. And the punished is going to be more physical activities. So during this particular hell week that Laif was one of the instructors for, there was a boat crew that was winning. It was boat crew number two. They were winning all the races, which is pretty common to see one boat crew start to dominate. And there was another boat crew, six that was getting crushed in every race. And so one of the senior instructors came to Laf and said, hey, let's try something out. Let's switch the leaders because each boat crew has a boat crew leader.

And he said, let's switch these leaders out and see what happens. So they switched the boat crew leader from the winning boat crew leader, went to the losing boat crew, the losing boat crew leader went to the winning boat. They all head out to do their races, and lo and behold, the boat crew that had been losing every race that now had a good leader, won the next race, and then continued to win. Saying that the chapter is called is no bad teams, only bad leaders. Because if you put a good leader in a bad situation, they're going to turn that team around and step them up and get them to win. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Jocko Willink. We'll be right back.

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It should work well on your phone. You can check out all the sponsors at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please do consider supporting those who support us and make this show possible. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Now, back to Jockow Willink. I almost thought you might have made this up when I read it originally

because it's such a perfect parable for this concept that I thought, what are the odds that they actually witnessed this happening? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized you probably witnessed this a bunch of different times. It's just not as clear cut away as it was in this boat group race.

Well, while Leif was doing that training, which is the basic training, I was actually running the more advanced training of sealed platoons getting ready to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. And so I would actually see this all the time. You would get a platoon that had a bad leader and they would be falling apart and failing training missions. And the guy would get fired. They'd bring a new leader and put them in and almost instantly you would see them succeed. It's an outstanding example and it almost does seem unbelievable. And even Laf says,

he says he couldn't believe it. But it is the reality. Again, I've seen it so many times. I can't even tell you. And the other thing is I would see seal platoons where a seal platoon is a seal platoon. It's a bell curve of guys. There's awesome guys in there. There's a bunch of guys that are really good. There's a couple stragglers that are pretty lame. And then you put a leader over them. And that's pretty much what a seal platoon is.

And when I'd go through this training, you know, some platoons would fail training operations over and over again. And some platoons would crush them. And it was always based on how well the leader did. What really surprised me about this was how quickly the losing boat went to the winning boat. You can't even think, oh, well, the winning boat, they had better athletic talent. they were less gassed out.

These are endurance athletes. The other one was the guys who shouldn't have been there. But the fact that they won, they didn't even need like a ramp up, warm up period. Oh, we're starting to get the hang of this leadership thing. No, it was like the next race they came in and won. I can't even imagine what you would have to do or say or the feeling that you would have to convey

to get all these tired guys who've been beaten up more than the other guys because they keep losing. So they're getting punished. They have had no rest. The other teams won a bunch, had a bunch of rest, maybe drank more water or whatever they're doing, chilling, laying on the beach at that time. And these guys turned around and beat the winners.

And it was even easy to think, well, the winners were maybe lollygagging because they were like, nobody can touch us, we're so far ahead. But they did beat everyone else too. They wanted to win too. So everybody wanted to win just as bad. And these guys who were, they weren't just dead last. They were the guys where you're like, are they okay?

They're so far back there. We don't even know what's happening to these guys. And they came back and crushed it. And a couple dynamics that might make this a little bit clearer if you look at a boat crew, when you're saying, hey, these guys were working harder than everybody because they were getting beat, they were coming in last, they were probably working less. The effort that they were making was to fight with each other, to say, hey, you need to paddle harder. Hey, what are you doing back over there? It was them fighting amongst themselves. And so you put six guys,

seven guys in a boat, and you take those guys and you say everyone paddle in a different direction, where's the boat going to go? The boat's not going to go anywhere. If you take those same seven guys, and you say, hey guys, we're all going to paddle, we're all going to paddle in this direction, we're all going to paddle as hard as we can, and we're going to do it until we win. All of a sudden, you've got a unified team, and that's the difference between winning and losing, and that all comes down to leadership. This is serious intensity. Did you bring that to the seals, or did that develop while you were there?

I would say I always had a fairly intense personality, especially when I was passionate about something. And so I'd say it's part of my personality. And I think that the SEAL teams was a place where that type of personality, for me, it tended to water and fertilize my personality quite well. Right. You could have been a gym teacher or Navy SEAL, but probably wouldn't have been great at French.

They would have been some good gym classes. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, there would have been a lot of boat races. When you go into the special forces, obviously there's an intense training, there's an intense vetting process. everyone who makes it through those seems to kind of start at the beginning of a new hierarchy. So what sets people apart in the new hierarchy as opposed to the old one? Because a lot of those guys

were probably running circles around everybody at Basic and all the other training that they had. Then they go to Buds or whatever Special Forces training camps for whatever branch. And then everyone's at a level playing field again, probably for the most part anyway. Yeah, when you get through SEAL training and I checked into SEAL Team 1, no one cares that you went to. through seal training. They don't care. Everyone's been through it. Literally the master chief of the command said, you made it through seal training. No one cares. We all made it through seal training. It means nothing here. So that's what you start with. What sets these guys apart? I mean, there's got to be a bunch of people who are all-star athletes. There's still going to be people that are more fit than the

next guy. There's going to be somebody who's bulkier and can't run as far as fast or whatever. But what is it that sets somebody apart where you go, this guy, this guy is next level. He seems to be really together. He seems to be really bulletproof when it comes to not having these weird mood swings or depression or whatever it is that affects these guys or is it just, is that an illusion that it affects everybody all the time and some people are better at hiding it? No, I think when you get to any special operations unit or really any team, what is it that makes somebody shine in any team? They do a good job with their work. They work hard. For me, I can tell you, I wasn't the smartest guy in the world. I wasn't the best athlete in the world. I was like marginal performer

when it comes to the runs, the swims. I passed what I needed to pass, but I wasn't winning. I don't think I, matter of fact, I know. I didn't win a single run during buds. I didn't win a single swim during buds. I didn't win a single obstacle course. I didn't win any of that stuff. As far as, you know, intelligence, I'm probably slightly smarter than your pad of paper.

You pointed to the iPad first and then went, nah, nah. That thing's got me. So what are you going to do? For me, what did I do? I just worked hard. I just got to work before most people. And the guys that I was friends with that really rose to the top, they worked hard, they got to work before everybody else, they focused on the gear, they helped with the team,

they always put the team before themselves. That's what makes a good team player, and that's what makes people excel in any organization, including the SEAL teams. When did you first experience or see violence firsthand after becoming a SEAL then? Because it seems like you go through all of these simulations in your training and you're going crazy with all that, and you must at some point think, let me at them, I'm ready for this. I would imagine there's some shift, there's some break between the reality of it and the imagination that you have during training. Well, the thing that's hard for a lot of people to understand, especially folks

that are younger, we were in a period of peace through the 90s, from the end of the Gulf War until September 11th, 2001, that was my first 10 years in the SEAL teams. I didn't shoot my weapon at the enemy for 13 years. my first 13 years in the military. And there was people that were in the seal teams from, you know, they missed Vietnam War and they did a 30-year career and never shot their weapon at the enemy. That's hard for some people to understand, but that's the reality. Yeah, that makes sense now. I wondered about the timing. And so, yeah, it was 13 years for me before I shot my weapon at the enemy for the first time. Did you ever think this is never going to happen? We're going to go

through this whole thing and never have to use our training, quote unquote? I trained, and the guys that I was friends with, we trained like we were going into combat tomorrow. We always had that attitude. That's not how everybody thought, but me and my friends, that's how we thought. We thought we are going into combat tomorrow. We're going to be ready. That way, when September 11th did happen, and when I did get my first firefight, I did feel ready. I was kind of stoked and also prepared. And so it wasn't. wasn't this huge crazy thing that happened. It was just sort of, okay, this is what I trained for and let's do it.

I wondered about the training intensity, and you said not everybody did this, but it seems like, obviously, some people do. You have to be able to bring the intensity to your training. Otherwise, it seems like you just wouldn't make it. I mean, at some point, you've got to be swimming along in the sea doing your 10,000 sit-up on the edge of one of those zodiacs and going, what the hell am I doing here? Why am I doing this? I'm never going to need this.

You're right. If you had an attitude of just, I'm never going to do this, then you're not going to be a good seal. Yeah, I won't even pretend that I belong there. But I feel like a lot of people probably say, no, I'm not saying you personally, but I'm saying someone that thinks I'm never going to need to know how to do this is not going to be a good seal because they're not going to have the right mentality when they're training. And to be honest, when I was running training, I was borderline psychotic, crazy about training because I had just got back from overseas.

I knew where these guys were deploying to. I knew that blood had been spilled. I know my friends had been killed. My guys had been killed. And I knew that the training that I was giving them, the training that I was in charge of, was what was going to keep them alive on the battlefield. So for me, the training was everything.

And I did everything I could to make that training as realistic, as demanding, as I wanted the training to be harder than combat. I wanted them to get into combat. And I actually had guys that came back and said to me, yeah, you know, we got in our first big firefight. And I was waiting to turn a corner and see you standing there saying, hey, we're going to bring the heat now. Right.

Because they were well prepared for these situations. And the reason they were well prepared was because we worked on the fundamental skills of combat, the fundamental skills of combat leadership. And then we drove them really hard. And the thing is, what we tried to do and what I tried to do was to teach people to think. I needed people to think. That's what a lot of people don't understand about the military. Combat is an exercise in creativity. It really is. You need to be creative and you need to have a mind that is very thoughtful when you're in combat because the enemy is going to do things you don't expect.

The terrain is going to be something you don't expect. The people that work for you are going to do things that you don't expect. The equipment you have is going to do things that you don't expect. Nothing is going to go the way you plan it to go. So therefore, you have to have a very open mind, a very agile mind and a mind that is ready to adapt and creatively find solutions to the problems that you confront. So when I was putting guys through training, we were giving them scenarios that the only way to get out of the scenario was to have a standard operating procedure, to know that standard operating procedure, to have the discipline to execute the standard operating procedure, and then on the fly decide that standard operating procedure is not going to work. We have to modify it this way. I have to think this way. And I got to

get my guys to come from a different direction, and now we're going to execute it and solve the problem. That's what I tried to train people to do. I try to train them to think. And you have to do that while things are exploding, people are shooting at you, or worse. It's funny that you said some of your guys came back and expected combat to be harder. I can imagine running through a city where people are shooting. There's explosions in the distance. Your support's too far away. And they're thinking, Wow, this run is not nearly as taxing as it was last week when Jocko made us run 15 miles with our packs on or whatever. Just to be clear here, when I talk about the training that I ran, it wasn't physical training. In other words, it wasn't, hey, run 15 miles with a pack.

We had simulated combat scenarios happening that were very, very realistic. I would hire actors to come down and special effects people to come down. We had them come down and make our cities look like they were. in Iraq. And when you put down your night vision goggles, you could easily be in Iraq. Easily. That's how outstanding the people did recreating scenes from Iraq. But then we bring down actors that were, you know, from whatever locale people were deploying to. So they'd hear the language. They'd have women. Oh, seals are easy with handling some guy. Oh, I got to do is smash them down to the ground. What about when it's a 62-year-old woman that doesn't understand

your language? How are you going to handle her? You know how you're going to handle it? You'd have to thing. So we would throw these scenarios and we would have special effects. So when you went into a room, a bomb would go off. And you get hit in the face with a bunch of cork and foam and there's smoke all around. And when the smoke clears, you hear screaming and on the floor is a guy with no legs and there's blood spraying all over the place and he's screaming. And that guy's an actor from Hollywood, an amputee actor. So now you say, okay, let's get the medic. Get over here. Start working on this guy. And right, when the leader calls the medic in, all of a sudden we start shooting him with paint. balls from different directions. Right. Oh, man. These are the kind of training. I'm not talking about

runs or swims. I'm talking about training to make people think. Yeah, because of course, when I think of things like buds, I think of what I see in movies or television where you're running on the beach, you've got to fin swim, you're doing the sit-ups on the edge of the zodiac. I mean, I'm already out of exercises. Yeah, and that's sort of the image of what seals are. And it's actually a fraction of your seal career is any of that stuff. And what you learn in that is a lot less applicable. That's why I think why our book is done well is because we're not saying, hey, do sit-ups, you'll be a better leader. In fact, doing sit-ups has almost nothing to do with being a better leader. What has to do with being a better leader is learning the principles of leadership. And that's why I think

we've done really well with the book. You mentioned some of the people that work with you are going to do different things when they're under pressure, when they're under fire. We're sitting home in America watching Fox News or listening to the radio, and we hear, oh, the Iraqi troops that we just trained, they just turned and ran. You just want to cry because you know how much trouble that we went through that you guys went through to train these guys and how much money it costs and how big of a problem that is for their country and how that just does not bode well for the future of Iraq and Afghanistan. What's going on when those people just say, screw this, even though they outnumber ISIS three to one, four to one. What are they doing? Why are they cutting bait?

Lack of leadership. It's as simple as that. It's a lack of leadership. This is what needs to happen. This is the effect that's going to have. Here's why this is an important mission. When no one's telling you that, and you're a 19-year-old Iraqi kid that's from Baghdad that's now out in the Al-Ambar province,

and you're seeing ISIS coming, and you're thinking, okay, why is this important? What is this all about? You know what you're going to do? You're going to run. Yeah. But when you have good leadership, everything changes. Are we doing things to educate some of these guys in different ways?

I remember one comment you'd made somewhere, you said, all right, count off. And they were like, half the group couldn't count to five. Not exaggerating. They couldn't count to five. Never had to do it. Grew up in a mud hut somewhere, didn't know how to count to five. Other guys, when they were running, instead of just running, they were shooting their guns back over their head behind them while you guys and whoever else was up front. Now you're getting shot at by your own guys, inadvertently, and by the enemy and all of your reinforcements are cutting and running. What's going on in your head when that happens? Is it just kind of a robotic calculation because of the amount of training that you've got where you go, all right, those guys are gone, our numbers are now this, this is what has to happen?

That's what it is. You know, you want to give yourself a quarter of a second to say, I wish this wasn't happening. Damn it. I wish those guys would do their job. And then you go, okay, now what are we going to do to deal with it. One particular situation I remember is, you know, seeing these guys running, they're shooting back over their heads. You know, I'm just trying to get them to cease fire. I'm literally looking at my guys downrange. You know, what do I have to do? I need to mechanically say, hey, cease fire, you stop shooting, lift your weapon, and get them to start acting responsibly with their weapons is the first thing I need to make happen. So yeah, you just go into a mode of, okay, there's the problem, and here's what we got to do to

fix it. Do you find that mindset has translated really well to civilian life as well? It seems like the situations are definitely still there, slightly less leaf. hopefully. Yeah, it absolutely does. And when you work with any team or any company and they come into a bad situation, what are they going to do? Are they going to panic? Are they going to get mad at each other and see an Iraqi shooting in the wrong direction and now just go into a temper tantrum and start yelling at him and start yelling at his leader and start going berserk, there may be a time when we get back to base where I may have to show anger. So I make sure that they get the message because if I've tried talking to him, and I've tried counseling, and I've tried pointing it out to them,

I've tried eight times to get this message across in a nice, calm, constructive way, and it hasn't worked. Maybe it's time that I have to show some anger. I have to calculate that, show some anger, so that they go, wow, I don't want that to happen again. That really bothered this guy. This whole shooting in the wrong direction is a bad thing, and I won't let it happen again. So, yeah, but to do that in the heat of the battle, what good is that going to do with? It's more distraction than anything. And so it's the same thing in the civilian sector. You've got something happening in your market. You've got something happened to your competitor.

You've got something happening with people that are leaving your company that've been recruited to somewhere else. Whatever situation you want to put up, okay, what are you going to do? Are you going to panic? Are you going to freak out? Are you going to get emotional? Or are you going to do something to actively resolve the issue? I vote that you do something to actively resolve the issue.

Growing up with my dad, for example, he was an emotional guy. Now he's really chill. He handles stress a lot better now. I don't know. Must have had a more stressful job than I imagine. Now that he's retired, he's great. but I get a lot of that from him and reading your book, for example,

reading extreme ownership, and learning from people who do things at a high performing level all the time, especially military. I find really are great at controlling some of that emotional response. Ironically, where you might normally have the most emotional response

because the stakes are so high, you tend to be the best at controlling it. You find somebody who their gig is starting 10 minutes late and they're losing it, even though the stakes are relatively low. I find that to be something that I'm still wrapping my head around

because it seems like that's really hard to train and retain. Yeah, and your gig is starting in 10 minutes, so what you're going to do is go berserk and get crazy and work yourself and start sweating before you even walk out to your gig. When reality is, if you said, okay, looks like we're starting 10 minutes late, you know what? I'm going to think of a good opening line right now. I'm going to think of a way to soften this when I get out there

and people go, wow, we've been waiting for this guy for a while, and he's 10 minutes late. I'm going to have an opener that's going to get him right back where I want him. So is that the better plan? or is it a better plan to go yell at the microphone guy because his batteries were dead and now he doesn't have any backups? What benefit does that get you?

And it goes back to what I talked about earlier. I talk about this on my podcast all the time. You've got to detach from those situations. You've got to detach from that emotion. You've got to detach from that chaos. And you just got to say, okay, how can I actually improve the situation? Oh, man.

It's funny that you use anger as a tool later on in order to convey an emotion because by that point, it may have dissipated to the point where you're like, well, we're still alive, that was bad. Oh, wait, hold on. I got to make sure you remember that that was bad. Let me think back to how I felt the second I saw you shooting over the shoulder with that rifle at one of my guys. All right, now I'm in the moment. Get over here and bring your commander with you. People don't follow robots, and robots don't have emotions.

So the difference between you and a robot is the fact that you have emotions. So if you never show those emotions in any way, shape, or form, you're a robot and people aren't going to follow you. Again, it's very important. I mean, you have to be in control of your emotions. And honestly, when I am getting angry, it's going to be a calculated decision to say, okay, I need to show this person some anger right now. Unless I'm dealing with some sort of technology, like a printer or a copy machine, that might be real anger. Any kind of electronic device. Yeah, I think we all have that in common. And luckily now you got people for that. Back then, you know, unless that's part of extreme ownership,

you're just like, look, I'm fixing this printer. No, I can't take ownership of printers. They hate me and I hate them. There's something going on there. Yeah, I mean, if I lost my temper with you, if you're my employee and I lost my temper with you and went all crazy, is that going to make you increase your respect for me? Not a chance.

Is it going to make you think, wow, I really want to work for this person? Is it going to even make you think I'm going to try and do my best job possible to keep this guy happy? No. Best case scenario I get is that you're in fear of me and you're doing something to avoid getting yelled at, but is that going to help you get over an obstacle? It's just a bad situation. The temper thing, the emotional thing

is generally something that needs to be controlled. It doesn't need to be eliminated, but it needs to be controlled. When you transitioned back into civilian life, was it hard for you to relate to civilians? Was there something that you had experienced that, granted, most of us have never experienced this? did you find it hard to transition back into the civilian life from the military, especially being in Ramadi in the intense combat you saw there?

I mean, coming back, I wasn't a civilian when I got back from Ramadi. I still had three years left. And coming back from Ramadi, I was definitely, I was very focused on training. So I guess you could say that it took a little bit of time to readjust to saying, okay, this person isn't actually going to die if they're standing in the street getting hit with a paintball. It took me a little while to get away from that. But overall, you know, the interesting thing about the civilian world and combat is civilians deal with all kinds of crazy things, too.

They deal with loss. They deal with disease. They deal with getting fired from their job. They deal with people committing suicide. They deal with all kinds of problems and issues that are just as heavy as what you might experience in combat. Now, the difference is that combat, you get a lot of that in a very short period of time. So you get like a lifetime's worth of suffering in one deployment. if you have a rough deployment.

And so you get some experience that you can hopefully learn from and really hopefully you can pass that information on to people that you know and say, hey, you know what? Here's how I got through situations like that. Here's what my team did to get through a situation like that. I think what I try to do with it is I think combat makes you better. It makes you understand people more. It makes you understand human nature better because it's a lifetime of experience

compressed into six months or a year. And so you should come out of that with some wisdom. So essentially it's real life with possibly higher stakes tuned up to 11 in terms of intensity. And then you come back from it thinking, all right, if I haven't learned anything from that, I'm in trouble. Most people come back having learned plenty, I would imagine. Yeah. And I think, you know, that's one of the things that happens as well.

And obviously it's been in the news a lot is, you know, we have guys going into significant depression and even committing suicide, which is obviously horrible. I think some of that comes from the fact that they dwell in those experiences and they stay there in their mind instead of saying, you know what, that was an experience. I'm lucky to have experienced the lifetime of situations and grief and sadness and happiness and joy, all those things in a year or in six months. That's heavy. But if people stay there and they dwell there and they don't move past it, that's where I think it becomes problematic. Do you ever miss Iraq or combat? Do you ever miss it at all? Every day. Really? Absolutely.

What do you miss about it? The crystal clear, absolute focus of my whole existence into that situation. It's almost like mindfulness in a way, but you're completely immersed in that. Completely and 100% everything about me is focused on this. and it's very difficult to get that focused on anything else in the world. I would imagine, do you think that's a primal instinct that just kicks in that we don't use much anymore

or is it something you develop? Well, I think that combat is a very primal instinct, and I think that's why people are drawn to it. I think that's why people join the military because they think, I want to fight other people. I own an MMA gym. That MMA gym is filled with people. What do those people want to do?

They want to fight other people. Yeah, I think it's primal, and I think it's part of being a human. You hear about war journalists, my friend who's been on the show before, Dan Harris, who hosts Nightline. He was a war journalist for a while, and he went to, I think, Iraq and Afghanistan, and he came back and he realized, I'm addicted to the rush from being in the situation, the focus of being in the middle of conflict. And he wasn't even in the conflict. He was around the conflict, and he felt like he needed to replace it. And he ended up with a drug problem, actually, as a result, because he was looking for the spikes and the focus that. that you get from being in those situations.

Most of us will never experience, or hopefully never experience anything like that unless that's what you're going for. But it does seem to be something that you find yourself thrust in there and something in your lizard brain just turns on and it seems like it would be hard to forget about that. It is hard to forget about it.

Again, in my mind, I think what a person needs to do that's struggling with that is look at it in a positive light. Look at those experiences in a positive light and be happy that you are lucky enough to live through that and experience those things and experienced a lifetime of struggle and strife and happiness and joy and sorrow, a lifetime of that in a six-month deployment or a one-year deployment or a 14-month deployment or however long that lasted for. But then once it's over, instead of staying in that cycle and looking back towards that, look forward.

Don't dwell in the past, but look forward to the future. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Jocko Willink. We'll be right back. And now for the rest of my conversation with Jocko Willink. I mean, if I were in your shoes, I'm not sure I could switch from fighting bad guys in Ramadi to hanging out at my MMA gym in San Diego without maybe having some things in the back of my head. Do you think about this at night as well? Is this something that do you wake up at night thinking what's the enemy doing?

Or do you have any kind of thought processes that you can't turn off that you devise you developed while you were there. Yeah, this all comes with some level of paranoia and some level of continually thinking about things that could happen. So yes, yes. And I like it. I like it. I want to have that. I'm happy that I have that. It makes me, me. And so I'm good with it. Is it even a darkness? Or is this something that's like, no, this is a thought process that I have. It's part of me now. It seems like for you, it's become more a part of you and less of a demon that you have to continually keep at bay in the back of your head. War is darkness. War is evil.

And there's evil people doing horrible things in war. And I think probably the difference between a lot of veterans and active duty people is they recognize that there's darkness in the world. They recognize that the evil is real. And I think that's, you know, with my podcast, so often I hear from veterans, they just say, thanks, man. I know what you're talking about. And even people that are relatives of veterans that write me and say, hey, you know what? I understand what my brother is thinking. I understand what my son is thinking. I understand where he's been. I understand it now. And so I think that, yeah, there's darkness in the world. And if you ignore it or you act like it's not there, that's just a little fantasy bubble that you live in and you're not facing reality.

And when the darkness does enter your world, which it's going to enter your world, it's somebody. point, I don't care who you are. Things are going to happen. Life is going to happen. Death is going to happen. And if you ignore those things throughout your life, you won't be prepared when they come. You mentioned extreme ownership as a mindset, an attitude. Tell us, first of all, what that means to you, what the phrase extreme ownership means. To me, the phrase extreme ownership. Self-explanatory. Means extreme ownership. The thing that's interesting about it is it's so easy, and as you said earlier, it's so simple to understand what it means, but it is definitely challenging to execute. Simple to understand, not easy to execute. Now, once you get in the mindset of it,

once you develop the attitude of extreme ownership, then it's very easy to do. And even you, after you read the book, you saw someone that wasn't implementing extreme ownership and they were blaming other people for something that went wrong, and it stands out like a sore thumb. And so what it is is not making excuses, not passing blame on to end. anybody else taking ownership of everything that affects you and your mission and making it right. That's what extreme ownership is. Why is it important? Because I'm thinking, look, when we kind of alluded to this earlier in the interview as well,

somebody else makes a mistake at work, why am I going to sit here and take the blame for it? What if I get in trouble? Won't this reflect poorly on me? Actually, no. If you're subordinate makes a mistake and you blame them, that will actually reflect horribly on you. And anybody in a leadership position that has people working for them that are blaming their team when things go wrong is not going to be a respected leader. They're going to be seen as a detriment. Whereas if something goes wrong with my team, they miss a deadline, they don't finish what they're

supposed to do. And I step up and say, hey, we didn't get this done. We didn't accomplish our objective. This is my fault because I am the leader and these are the changes I'm going to make to fix it next time around. Now of a sudden you say, okay, I respect that. And I have faith that you're actually going to implement those changes. Whereas if all you're doing is blaming other people, we're not getting anywhere. Nothing's going to change. How do you implement this then? Is this a top down type of thing? When you go in and you teach this to CEOs and businesses, you start with them, I assume? We sometimes do, but sometimes we get brought in at various levels of companies. The simplest way to explain how to implement this is to start doing it. And it's, and it's

can start at any level of chain of command. For instance, if I work for you and you come back and you say, hey, we failed this project, it's your fault, Jocko, and I go, you know what, boss, this is my fault. This is my fault. Here's what I did wrong. Here's the mistakes I made with my team. Here's what I'm going to do to fix it. Now, what are you going to say? Are you going to say you're damn right. That was your fault? No, you're going to look at me and say, wow, this guy's stepping up. And you're going to start to take ownership of what you did wrong. You know what, Jocko, I could have done better giving you more time to get this done. I set the deadline too early. That's my fault. All of a sudden we got problems and we're both taking ownership of the problems and we're both solving the problems. When you have a

team where everybody is solving the problems, that's when you end up with a really, truly, highly performing team. Is this something you came up with to train in the teams or is this something that's been around for a while that you codified? It's something that in the seal teams, it was just the way I was. And in the SEAL teams, I would identify the difference between people that took ownership and people that didn't. Leaders that took ownership and what those teams would look like, what those platoons would look like, what those task units would look like, and leaders that didn't take ownership, and what those teams would look like, and what those platoons would look like. And the difference was stark. And so when we moved in the civilian world, I saw the same

thing. When people took ownership of things, then it became the whole team took ownership. And when people didn't take ownership, no one on the team took ownership. It was an idea that then formulated, the more I saw it, eventually I said, oh, this is it. These people take ownership. These people don't. The actual term stem from an email that I wrote to a leader. And I was saying, listen, I see everyone pointing fingers at each other. When I was in a SEAL task unit, when I was a task unit, commander of task unit bruiser, the commander would go around the room and say, what do you need to the different task unit commanders? What do you need? And a guy would say, well, we need this gear and we need this and I need more training on that. And you go to the next guy and the next

guy, I'd say, we need internet out at the training facility and we need this and this other thing. And the commander would get to me and he'd say, Jocko, what do you need? And I'd say, I don't need anything. We're good to go. Because if there was a problem, I'm not going to tell my boss. I'm going to solve that problem. I'm going to get that gear. I'm going to figure it out. And I said in the email, I said, I took ownership, extreme ownership of everything in my world. I wasn't out there saying, I need this and I need that. I just took ownership of it. And that phrase is what kind of caught on with some folks that we worked with and said, we need to take extreme ownership. And I said, yes, you do. You do need to take extreme ownership and it kind of built from this.

Are there any times when it doesn't make sense to say, okay, this is my fault? Are there exceptions to this somewhere? For the most of the time, I mean a vast majority of the time. Probably in hypothetical land, is one, but we've worked with scores of different companies, small companies, big companies, Fortune 500 companies, little startups. We've worked with every kind of company. And not once have I said, you know what, this is going to go a lot better if you don't take ownership of what's happening. I haven't said, hey, you should blame your team. Or you know what, your boss isn't giving you the support you need. You should blame your boss. You should fail, and I shouldn't blame your boss. I haven't said that one time yet. If we're working in an organization, can I suddenly read this book,

which will be linked up in the show notes, of course. Can I read this book and go, I'm doing this, and then have it affect the other people around me? What if I'm low on the totem pole? Is it still going to work? It absolutely will. I was the youngest and most junior guy in my first two sealful tunes.

I had this attitude back then, and that spreads. All of my buddies acted like this. We all acted like this. We weren't going to blame if something went wrong. If the boat motor didn't run, we didn't blame each other. We said, okay, this is our problem.

How do we get this thing fixed? How do we make sure? We need to run the motors more. to make sure the fuel doesn't get contaminated by the salt water because this is what happens and now we ended up with the situation. How can we overcome that problem? We didn't say, hey, that guy's responsible for the fuel. The fuel is contaminated. It's his fault. He better fix it next time. No, we work together as a team to solve these problems. To clarify, this isn't just, oh, well, you know, I didn't do something so everybody get mad at me. There's something being done here with the

blame where you're just absorbing it so you can move beyond it, correct? Just to kind of spell it out. And this is kind of an anecdote that I talk about. If we take a SEAL troop and they're going out on a training operation and they're horrible, everything goes bad. They come back from this training operation. And, you know, I go, okay, the boss, I say, hey boss, that didn't go too well. What happened out there? And if the boss says, well, I'll tell you what went wrong.

Number one, Jordan, he was charged the assault team. He didn't have enough guys, which means he couldn't take down the target quick enough, which means we were out there for too long. That was ridiculous. Jordan needs to fix what he's doing. he might even get fired. And then Jen, who was in charge of the Humvees, guess what? She didn't show up where she was supposed to show up with the Humvees to pick us up. That's her fault. She's ridiculous. I can't believe that you did that, Jen. So now, what's your reaction when I do that?

What's your reaction when I blame you? What's anybody's reaction when I blame this? You're going to get defensive. And you are going to blame someone else. You're going to blame members of your team. You're going to blame me. You might not say it, but you might blame me for not giving you what you needed. and so now you've got a problem, you're not solving it. Jen's feeling the same way she's not solving her problem. We got a disaster on our hands. It's horrible. So now let's take the same scenario.

We go out on a training operation. We send a troop out on a training operation. They do a horrible job. They come back and we go to the debriefing room. And I say, hey, boss, that didn't go too well. What happened? And he says, well, you know what? First of all, Jordan went to hit the target,

and I didn't give them enough guys to take down the target. I thought it was a smaller target, I thought he could get it done. That's my fault, Jordan. I didn't give you the resources you needed. I apologize. It won't happen again. Next time we'll definitely have a face-to-face. And Jen, you missed us at the extract point with the vehicles. I can't believe that I let you walk out of the brief without confirming that you knew where you needed to be and when you needed to be there. And not just you, but your whole team should have known that. And so that's my fault, too. I let you walk out of the brief without the information you needed. So that's my fault.

And from now on, I'm going to get that confirmed. Now what you're at. attitude going to be. Not what's your attitude? Jordan's going to say, you know what, boss? I looked at the target longer than you. You had other stuff going on. I knew I might need more guys. I thought I could pull it off, but I went underhanded. I won't let that happen again. It's my fault. We'll get it solved. And then Jen's going to look at me and say, hey, you know what, boss? I walked out of the brief. I thought I knew. And I thought to myself, maybe I should confirm, but I didn't say anything. And the fact that my whole team was out there and didn't know where to go and when to go there. And I didn't confirm that. What happens if I got shot? Now we're lost.

And so Jen would have taken ownership of that problem. So what we end up again, what we end up with is the whole team, where the whole team is grabbing hold of those problems, taking ownership to those problems and then solving the problems. And that's the huge difference. Right. You end up instead of looking for how to defend yourself or blame other people or point fingers, you think, okay, what did I do that contributed to this that we can then fix for next time so we don't end up in the same situation again? Like if I say, hey, it was my fault, you know, I didn't explain it to you or I didn't study the target well enough and I didn't get, you don't look at me and say, that's right boss it was your fault that was pathetic no you feel bad because we got a unified vision we're trying to make something happen and you let me down i'm not going to say that i'm going to say i let you down and i'm going to mean it this isn't about just lip service of hey this is all my fault gents sorry no this is about i truly believe that if i sent you on this target without enough people that is my fault and i need to fix it. The only thing I can see getting in the way of this would be an ego problem. We mentioned this earlier. How do you strip the ego out of somebody who might otherwise be a good leader but is hung up on maybe accolades or validation or avoiding any kind of dirty hands for any

shit that goes down that's not up to snuff? How do we strip the ego out of somebody like that? Or do you have to filter for people like that? Are those people salvageable at all? It can happen. It can happen. But if you want to remove someone's eagy, go, it's going to come from the pain and suffering of failure. And so, you know, in the SEAL teams, by the time you get into a leadership position, generally you've been through enough pain and suffering and failure to realize you're going to make mistakes. And it's okay.

We already talked about this, but if I take blame for something as a leader, you don't lose respect for me. You go, wow, he's stepping up and taking the blame for all the stuff. I respect that guy. But people that haven't been in these situations before, they are insecure. in their own leadership. They think, if I admit that I'm wrong or I take blame for something, everyone's going to look at me like I'm a worse leader than I am and I can't handle that. No, because I'm the best person in the world. You're 100% right. I mean, that's why there's a

chapter in the book called Check the Ego, because the ego is a massive problem if you let it get out of control. And the way that ego gets checked over time is my life, is by failure, is by reality. That's what humbles you over time. You mentioned that as a leader, it's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate. Can you tell us about that? I feel like in every organization that I've ever been a part of, what people tolerate, what we as an organization tolerate, it starts to expand over time, and eventually it poisons everything. Yeah, and that's actually a line that Leif wrote, and it's true. He told a story the other day, this was when I was a troop commander, he was one of the platoon commanders, and we were going through this block of

training, really hard training, really stressful training, really physical training, out in the desert in the summertime, and the block of training is about three weeks long of preparation and learning tactics and gunfighting, and then they put you into a field training exercises where you're going to do these big exercises, these big training operations. And in between those two little sections, there's a break where they give you a day or two days where you can go and they'll let you go into town, maybe guys have some beers and let off some steam and whatever. You know, he was telling the story that that's what sealed task units do when they're at this training site. And when we went through training and that day came, they didn't even come to me and say,

hey, can we go out tonight? Hey, can we go and have a few beers? They knew what I would say. They knew that what I would say was, listen, we are out here to train. We've got training operations coming up. We need to be ready on those. When we get back to San Diego, we'll go drinking some beers. But right now, what we need to focus on is the job at hand. There's not going to be any slack out here. Let's not do that. And that's because those guys knew me. They knew what I was going to tolerate. And they knew also that I didn't even have to preach that stuff. You know, those guys were just on board. Everyone in that task unit wanted to be the best.

Everyone in that task unit was ready to do what they had to do to get the best reputation we could have. And that's why we performed really well. Do you get to select the people in your task unit or is just something that you have to build the people in your task unit? You get assigned to people. So everybody that was there was a good performer in large part because if they weren't quite up to it when they got assigned to you,

they fell in mind because of the training. Yeah, and they got help. We helped each other out. Sure. We took guys that needed extra training. We'd give them extra training. Anybody that didn't understand something, we'd make sure they understood it.

And our goal was that everybody in the task unit was good to go. It must be almost weird being separated from people like that after going through things like combat and where you're watching each other's back and you're always together 24-7. It almost seems like separation anxiety. Oh, yeah. You get, we call that teen guy separation anxiety. Oh, really?

You're used to being with seals and now you're not with them anymore. Right. And so you go through this phase of what is the world really about when I'm not around all these guys? Because you work with them, you eat with them, you drink with them, you work out with them, and you actually live with them. So while I was in the SEAL teams, no doubt my family saw a lot less of me than my platoon did. They're not even close. Not even the same ballpark. It's probably 75% with the troop, with the platoon.

and 25% with the family. You mentioned that when you were in combat, when you were in Ramadi or Iraq in general, you didn't have a lot of photos of your family up on the wall. Why was that? Is that a focus thing for you? Why? Because I had guys that were putting their lives on the line

on a daily basis, and I needed to be focused on making sure that I did everything I could to make them as safe as possible and give them the best chances of going out, executing their mission, coming back. Every time the guys rolled out the gate, there was a significant chance. They were going to get in a firefight. That was a given. There was a significant chance that they were going to die. So what could I do?

What could I be thinking about? What could I be adjusting? What could I be looking at? What intelligence could I be pouring over that increases their capability of accomplishing the mission and saying in the life? So these two things can't be weighed against each other. My family's in San Diego. They're going to going to school, getting their school lunches, they're going to the beach on the weekends, they're going to be fine. I can't think about them right now. It sounds like how we started the show

if you can only focus on the things that you can control, there's no point in worrying about other things. Yes, and I was not worried about my family. Of course, do I care about my family? Absolutely. I've been married for a long time. I got four awesome kids. That's great, but I can't be thinking about them

when I got lives at stake. Last but definitely not least, there's a concept in the book that leader should never be satisfied. Can you speak to that? Of course, we're always striving to improve, but how do we create that and build that mindset into the team? Is it simply just leading by example? Because I feel like there's always going to be some people that won't fall in line. You should absolutely be leading by example. You should absolutely be living that example. not just at work, but with your life and how you're doing mentally, physically. What are you doing to get smarter? What are you doing to get better?

What are you doing to become a better leader? What are you doing to become a better follower? All those things, and you apply those things from your personal life to your team because you want your team to be saying the same things and thinking the same things. What can we do to be a stronger team? What can we do to be a smarter team? Be a better team. That's what you want as a leader.

In matter of fact, you can't impose this on them. You can't be as a leader. You can't be in everyone's head or standing over their shoulders all the time. What you have to do is you have to foster this culture where everybody wants to win. Everybody wants to do the best. Everybody wants to improve. That's what you're looking for. And when you end up doing that with your team and you convey that culture of excellence,

of not being satisfied as a person or as a team, when you convey that and you instill that culture, you will end up with excellence across the board. Jocko, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. I've got some thoughts on this episode, of course, but before I get into that, here's a sample of my interview with Maria Konnikova, who went from being someone who had no interest whatsoever in poker to raking in big bucks as an international poker champion. Here's a quick look inside. Poker is actually the perfect game for human decision-making, because it's a game of incomplete information. No one cares where the hell you went to school. No one cares what you look like. No one cares

what you did or didn't do. If you can afford the buy-in, great. So there are people sitting at the table, some of whom have Ivy League educations, others of whom dropped out of high school and had to wrestle with homelessness and built up their bankroll from $10 and took that $10 and are now millionaires. We make decisions and incorporate things that really shouldn't matter all the time, Like the weather. We don't realize that we're depressed because it's raining outside and instead we're like, oh, life sucks, everything sucks. But it's so cool that if you draw someone's attention to the reason why they're feeling this way,

they're totally capable of discounting it and saying, oh, okay, yeah, I'm depressed right now, but it's because of the weather. Can you figure out not just your own triggers, but the other person's triggers? Some people, when they lose a lot, they're going to become really cautious because they don't want to lose even more. Some people when they lose a lot are going to become extra reckless because they want to gain it back very, very quickly. Same event, totally different reactions. Can I try to figure out what the psychological dynamic for this person is? How do they react to loss?

Some people, when they win a lot, they're going to become extra cautious because now they don't want to lose it. They're like, oh, I have all these chips. I want to guard them. Other people, when they win a lot, they're like, yeah, let's push my advantage. Let's go. If you can start to figure out and pull apart things like that, all of a sudden you have a really good psychological picture of the person and you can take advantage of it. It's really intrigued me and I thought, let me read more about this poker thing and decided,

hey, you know what? This is my book. Why don't I learn poker? Why don't I actually see how far I can go? And I ended up becoming good and winning a major international title and getting a sponsorship from poker stars and joining team pro and somehow found myself as a professional poker player. For more, including how people make decisions and what poker can tell us about reading human motivation, how to spot real physical tells at the poker table and in real life, and how we can control and prevent emotional thinking, aka going on tilt. Check out episode 371 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Maria Konnikova. Well, intense interview. I remember it very clearly.

This is about half a decade ago now, but this is one of those where I thought, wow, okay, I got to do more of these in person. There's just an energy there that's not present when you're on friggin' Zoom. Done on the spot, flew down to see him in San Diego. I'm thankful we did this in person. It was just great to meet, great to hang out, great to do it face to face. And look, extreme ownership is a very powerful principle that seems maybe even overly simplistic at first, right? But it is far harder to implement than it seems at first glance.

People think they take responsibility, but when you really take extreme ownership, you see the changes right away. I've seen this in my own life. I've seen this in my business. I highly recommend people read it and do it and implement it right away. You will see results. There will be a yield from this for you. We'll link to all things Jocko in the show notes as well. Please use our website links if you buy books from any author on the show.

It helps support the show when you do that. Transcripts in the show notes, there's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same system. software and tiny habits that I used over in our six-minute networking course, the course is free, over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty,

and most of the guests that you hear on the show, subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course, come join us. You'll be in smart company where I know you belong. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rock by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know any Jocko fans or somebody who needs to learn about the concepts of extreme ownership, please do share this episode with them. And hopefully you find something great in every episode of this podcast. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with

those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. Manufacturing is never simple, but Epicure makes it easier. and AI tools help you increase throughput, reduce downtime and improve cash flow, without adding complexity. If you're ready to run a smarter, more efficient factory, visit epicor.com. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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