The Jordan Harbinger Show - 93: Jocko Willink | Leading on the Line Between Extreme and Reckless

Episode Date: September 11, 2018

Jocko Willink (@jockowillink) rejoins us to discuss his latest book, The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win. What We Discuss with Jocko Willink: What happens when we take the "extreme" part of extreme ownership too literally. Why otherwise positive characteristics can be detrimental to progress when we forget the importance of balance. When to take responsibility, and what the limits of this actually are. Why we should stop being the easy button for those we manage and lead. The concept of leadership capital: how to build it, when to use it, and when not to use it. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFillopo. Today we're talking again with my friend Jocko Willink, his new book, The Dicotomy of Leadership, balancing the challenges of extreme ownership to lead and win. Extreme Ownership, if you read that book, and if you haven't, by the way, that book just crushed it. Tons of people were impacted by this. One of my favorite books, my wife and I love that. It's really had a huge impact on my life as well, both in business and otherwise. This new, book, The Dicotomy of Leadership has Leadership Tensions, such as Prepare, But Don't Overprepare, Be Aggressive, But Not Reckless, Things Like That. We're going to explain all of these. We're going to go into depth on some of the examples here in the show. And today, we'll learn when to take responsibility or take extreme ownership and what the limits of that actually are. We'll also explore why we should stop being the easy button for those we manage and lead. and we'll discover the concept of leadership capital, how to build it, when to use it, and more importantly, when not to use it. Of course, we've got worksheets for this episode, which we do for every show.

So if you want to solidify your understanding of all the practicals and key takeaways here from Jocko Willink, that link is in the show notes, jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And if you want to know how I managed to book all these great people, manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits, check out our level one course it's free it's over at advanced human dynamics dot com slash level one now here's jocco willink I look at things I wanted to do when I was a kid and I even in my and I say even in my 20s and early 30s and I just think what was I thinking you know I would never do that stuff now I stuff hurts more now and I've lost a lot of my I guess probably like desire for adventure you know going to North Korea and stuff like

that four times that was cool now I'm like what was I doing I will never do that my parents must have slept for like five years yeah do you do you lose any of that because I feel like you're still kind of doing a lot of the same stuff probably that you were doing before I don't I don't know I don't think I guess you said the quest for adventure is that what you said just like the idea that I could go and do something and there'd be no probably no consequences that I would actually have to pay for that sometimes I think I forget about consequences a little bit and But one thing about me is I've traveled a lot and I don't really love to travel, actually. I would rather just stay home.

And, you know, I kind of have my own little world at home with my house and the ocean and my gym and my garage gym and my jihitsu gym. And it's a nice little deal. Yeah. And I've tried to travel all the time. Yeah. You also have that. I would prefer to just stay at home. Does that mean I'm not adventurous, possibly?

But maybe I just like to do stuff that I like to do now more. That's possible. I always feel like in there's something that probably changes when you turn a certain age or maybe when you have kids, which I don't yet, where you go, yeah, maybe I don't want to live for three years in a South American country anymore. Maybe I just don't want to do that. Whereas before, if someone's like, hey, we're going to move you to Russia, you're going to live in Moscow and you have to work at this random job, it'd have been like, yes, I'm going to learn

Russian, it's going to be great. Now I'm like, hell no. I won't be able to have dinner with my wife all the time at her parents' house or whatever. I won't be able to hang out with my cat. Like that stuff somehow, for some reason, I'm looking back at my old self and that person's looking back at me and going, who the hell are you? Well, I guess there's probably some genetic component of the fact that, you know, you just said you're looking at having kids now.

And before, well, now you're married. And so now you have a possibility of having kids. And so part of your mind is thinking, okay, I got to. set myself up that I can take care of these kids whereas before part of your adventure seeking was looking for a suitable person to have kids with of course and maybe that could have been a Russian girl that's right and maybe that's a good deal for you and you're thinking hey I'll go there and and we'll see what happens but once you find that person and now you're saying okay well now I've got sort of even subliminally you've got this situation set up where you're looking at what

the future is going to hold for you and your potential family So I think that's probably, it probably has a pretty good subliminal drive on your brain. I think that's true. I think anybody right now who's honest with themselves, any guy I should say, and is thinking, oh, I'd love to go travel. Tell me that one of the top three reasons is not you're going to meet some women in that country. And just like try to honestly tell me that's the reason. Maybe I'll believe you.

But I think for me it was like, I'm going to see and experience new things, but mostly I wonder what the women look like. This is great. I can't wait. Then you get down there and you're like, all right, this is. is just everything I wanted and more. Hopefully. Hopefully. So we were talking about the book.

We were talking about publishers and flexibility. And it seems like being nimble and being flexible enough. Obviously, that's one of the ideas in the dichotomy of leadership. And you said he had a story about that. I think that publishers have a lot going on. And there's a lot more than meets the eye to what they do and what they try and get done. And so, you know, even when you look at the fact that they have to print the books, right, They have to copy.

They have to edit the books and they have to print the books. And then they have to make sure that the edit and the copy went well. And then they have to distribute those books to thousands of locations. So there's an element of logistics behind publishing. Actually, a huge element of logistics, which is probably the most challenging thing for publishing company is the logistics behind everything. So, yeah, with the dichotomy of leadership, you know, it was a tight timeline. And part of the thing that made the timeline tight is getting the book. approved through the Pentagon.

So for military books, you have to submit them to the Pentagon for approval. They look for any information in the book, which may be classified in any way. And if they find it, then they remove it. And then you can publish the book. And that process can take, because it's a, you know, that's another huge bureaucracy is the Pentagon. And so we submitted our book. And that was kind of the last thing we were waiting for was to get any recommended or any

any changes that the Pentagon was giving us to make. And once we had those changes, then we had to do those fast final edits, which we literally did in probably 30 minutes, Laif and I, we were on the phone. He lives in Texas, and we were just on the phone.

We talked through it because it wasn't really, really small edits from the Pentagon. I mean, almost minutes ago, probably didn't even take a half an hour. Because we know what's classified and what's not. What kind of stuff is classified? Like the names of gear and what it does are like places?

The things that you think would be classified are what's classified. are what's classified. So it's all obvious. And on top of that, there's some little random things that occasionally you'll have a certain, because they get reviewed by a team of individuals, right? And those team of individuals might have different opinions of what's classified and what's not. And Laif and I both, you know, we both held top secret clearances.

We know what's classified and what's not. So we're writing the book within the realms of what we already know is we can say. And obviously, more importantly, we're absolutely making sure that. that we're not going to say anything that would in any way give away tactics, techniques, or procedures to the enemy, right? Any information that the enemy could use in any way, we're not putting in there. And so we know that, and that's how we submit the book, and that's why there's, the corrections are these really minor things.

Maybe it's the name of a piece of gear. Maybe it's something like that where we go, okay, you know what? We know that that information is common knowledge and that every single person that has any interest whatsoever can google that and find it out in 30 seconds but if you want us to pull it out of the book that's fine we would rather be safe than sorry and that's mostly what it is some little item that we know for a fact is i mean we could literally google the things that are yeah that were removed from the book which is again it's it's it's really minor removed from the book and you i could say oh yeah this got removed from the book i'm not going to do that because yeah well that's kind of said so yeah

um but then once that gets done that's the last thing we were waiting on and then finally and we were actually getting close to where we might have had to push back the release date, which is a problem. Is it a catastrophe? No, it's not a catastrophe, but we have our schedule constructed in such a way that we have some time off when the book comes out so that we can do some interviews when the book comes out and whatnot. And if we move to the book launch, then we'd probably move it into somewhere that we

already have previously scheduled things, and that would be that. So there's, luckily, we got the book and the book is coming out as it's supposed to on September 25th. Nice. And this should be out at that point anyway, so nobody has to worry about that. The title, by the way, the dichotomy of leadership balancing the challenges of extreme ownership to lead and win. Was this partially inspired, I guess, by people going, all right, I'm going to take extreme ownership and then taking it way too far, being too extreme with their extreme ownership? Absolutely. And it's one of the things that we write in the opening of the dichotomy leadership is one of the problems with the book Extreme Ownership is the title Extreme Ownership and the word. extreme in the title because people think oh we're just gonna be super extreme with everything and and people some people would have a tendency to do that and if you read the whole book you realize that that's that's definitely not the message should you take extreme ownership and should you be should you be fully responsible of everything

in your world to the utmost of your ability yes you should but when we say to keep things simple does that mean you keep things so simple that you don't think about any contingency plans or you don't carry out a detailed plan at all or you don't look at what might happen. You don't look at secondary consequences. No, that's not good planning. So you can be too simple. Even with something like cover and move, which is, hey, we're going to support other teams around my team. You know, if I'm on team A and team B is doing something, well, I'm going to cover and move. I'm going to help them. I'm going to support them. And that's a really positive thing. But what happens if I take that to the extreme and now I start getting in their role?

into the weeds with what they're doing. I start stepping on the toes and I start interfering with what they're actually trying to get done. I can actually take that too far. So yes, the idea of extreme ownership is awesome, but there is a tendency for

people to take things to the extreme or to try and take things to the extreme. And the hardest thing about being a leader is that all these positive characteristics, if you take them too far, they can become a negative. So if you've got someone that's a good aggressive leader right that's great you've got someone that's going to make

things happen that's awesome but if you've got someone that's overly aggressive well then they're doing things that are dumb they're they're they're taking too much risk if you've got a leader that is a good orator and can speak well and that's great right can make himself clear when they when they communicate with their troops that's great but can you have someone that a leader that continues to talk and talks too much and ends up up talking so much that the people in the team don't know what's important or what's not. Yes, that can happen. Now, the other side of that is, can you have a leader that doesn't talk enough?

Yes, you can. You can have a leader that is too shy or won't put out the word when it needs to be, when it needs to be put out. So every characteristic that you can have for a leader can be taken to an extreme. Even the most important characteristic that I talk about all the time, which is humility, right? Like, you've got to be humble as a leader. You've got to always look, okay, how can I improve?

Why I need to listen to other people. Well, as a leader, you can actually be too humble where you don't stand up when somebody's telling you to do something that you don't think is right, but you're like, hey, I'm humble, so I'm going to do it anyways. Well, if you don't think it's right, you actually shouldn't do it. So every positive characteristic can be taken so far to the extreme that it becomes a negative. And that is why, as a leader, you have to be balanced. And that's what the dichotomy leadership is about. Yeah, each chapter has a different dichotomy. So like train hard but train smart or aggressive but not reckless.

And so each chapter is kind of a standalone. And it's similar to extreme ownership in that it has like it starts off with bullets or something like that generally combat and then or simulated combat and then a business principle and then a business story that goes into it. And extreme ownership as people know crushed it as a book. Tons of people were impacted by this. I was having dinner with a friend of mine the other day and he said, yeah, you know, I'm thinking about breaking up with my girlfriend because. she just, she blames other people for everything. And I'm always like, you know, you got to take some extreme ownership over your, your situation.

And then he kept complaining about her over and over and over. And I was like, you know, you need to take some extreme ownership over your situation. And it was like, oh, man, you know, because it goes deep. Because you can always come, if you go so far with it, the clock could hit you in the ass when it goes back around to 12. Yeah, the example that I used on my podcast the other day of this is, and it's a great example to use, is the weather, right? So if you're planning a mission and you have to go execute this mission and the weather, so you're going to take helicopters to go hit a target somewhere.

And the weather turns out bad and the helicopters can't fly. And you go, you know, hey, that's not my fault because the weather was bad and I can't control the weather. And everyone will agree that we can't control the weather. And so it's like that wasn't my fault. And you could say, yep, everyone says, yep, you're excused. But a good leader will say, you know what? we didn't execute the mission because the helicopters couldn't fly and I can't control the weather, but what I could have done is I could have come up with a contingency plan in case the weather was bad.

I should have thought of that. I should have had vehicles on standby. I should have pre-stage somewhere that was closer so that if we did get a weather problem, we could still execute the mission. So I'm still going to take ownership. And when you have that attitude, what it does is it drives you to be more successful because you know, if you always have some kind of excuse in the back of your back pocket that you can win, out at any time, then you don't try and cover all the bases.

You're not going to plan as well. But when you know that, hey, this is on me. It's on me to get this mission accomplished. It's on me 100%. If that's your attitude, you'll cover those bases and you'll get the mission executed. You got a story in the book about you actually planning things yourself and not handing things off to other people. And then the process of like, I got to let some of this stuff go.

Tell us about that. Because I think a lot of people suffer from that, too. Yeah, well, it was my first deployment to Iraq. So it was my first time being in any combat situation. And of course, I was, I don't want to call it paranoid, but yeah, I'll call it paranoid. I wanted everything to go really well. Sure. And when you get that attitude, you start thinking, okay, I got to do everything myself.

And so I kind of grabbed all the planning myself and kind of held on to it. And it wasn't a long period of time. It was a couple operations where I said, oh, I'm going to plan this, I'm going to plan this, I'm going to plan this. And I kind of held on to it all. And I was, you know, my guys were sort of doing what I told them to do, which is great, because they're great. because they're great guys, but I was thinking to myself, you know, why aren't they stepping up? Well, the reason they weren't stepping up and taking ownership, because I was holding on to all the ownership myself.

And then luckily, what happened was we started getting the opportunity to do so many different missions that one day, I think we had four missions in one day, and I knew I couldn't plan them all. And so I, you know, tasked them out, hey, you cover this one, you cover that one, you cover this one, you cover this one, you cover the other one. And of course, the guys who are great guys, they went out, they came up with great plans went out executed the missions and I it hit me like a slap in the face like oh you weren't you were micromanaging and when you micromanage people they lose their initiative and that's what I did

and like I said luckily it didn't last very long it may not have even been obvious to those guys but it was pretty obvious to me once I once I saw it get resolved if we're running a business or we're running an organization and we're just starting to realize that we might need to hand some things off how do we balance taking the extreme ownership part or any ownership with actually empowering other people on the team. I mean, is there a point where you go, oh, crap, I'm doing everything myself. Well, how do you know when you're doing everything yourself? And it's a problem when you're getting overwhelmed, when the ball starts getting dropped, right? If I can do everything that I'm supposed to do and I can still survive and still do a good job,

well, then guess what? Then that's fine. I don't need any support. You know, like, okay, I've got this. But the minute that you've got things falling through the cracks, then you go, okay, it's falling through the cracks. Why is it falling through the cracks? I'm a good person. I'm a hard worker. But things are through the cracks, that's because I need support and I need to hand some of this stuff off and I need to put trust in my troops to get things done. And that's an empowering thing. Now, of course, this doesn't mean that you give up ownership when something goes wrong, right? When things go wrong, you still got to take ownership of that so that you can get the problem solved. Yeah, I think a lot of folks don't realize. And I know this just from entrepreneurship or small business

ownership, which is a term I prefer because entrepreneurs, a word that's been beaten to death. when you're freed up, you get less time in the weeds so you can see the bigger picture and you can go, you know, we've been busting our ass on the strategy for a month. I don't even want to achieve this result. Like if everything is successful, I end up with a really successful YouTube channel and I don't want to be on freaking YouTube. I just want to do something else. I was trying to write a book. Where did that happen? You know, I got bogged down with this other project.

And I think a lot of people, especially when they own a business with themselves or one other person, it's so tempting to be like, all right, I'll handle everything on the internet and you handle everything in the brick and mortar. And then you just end up tearing your hair out if you have any left six months later and wondering why the hell you built this terrible life for yourself. Yeah, well, I used to talk about standing back and being the tactical genius, and I still do. It's an extreme ownership, which is if I would, if I would task guys with coming up with a plan for an operation and they would get dive into it. right and they'd basically be staring at the map from one inch away right they're just staring at this thing up close they're in the weeds and i'd let him plan for two three four hours and come rolling in and when i come in i say hey what's your plan look like and they'd kind of say okay we're going to go in here we're going to do this and of course i'd say well hey that looks like a good plan but you

missed this you know this this piece of high ground over here that if we don't have that the enemy can get the drop on us will be a big problem and and and they would kind of think man how do we miss that. How do we not see that? One of the reason they couldn't see it is because they were too close to the planning process. So yeah, when you get into the, in the weeds too much, you can't see this strategic picture, for sure. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Jaco Willing. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash advertisers. And if you be so kind, please drop us a nice rating and review

in iTunes or your podcast player of choice. It really helps us out and helps build the show family. If you want some tips on how to do that, head on over to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe. Now back to our show with Jocko Willing. Symptoms of micromanagement that you listed in the book, which I thought were really interesting. Lack of initiative, all right, fine. If you're taking all the responsibility, why should I bother? Waiting to be told about solutions to problems, kind of the same thing or similar thing. I'm not going to turn on my critical thinking if you're just going to do it for me and will not mobilize and take action.

One thing, though, that I hadn't heard before was bold action becomes rare. Can you tell us what that even means? Because I think a lot of us don't really know what bold action even is. Well, I'll tell you, when you'd see that is when you get a situation that requires bold action. For instance, you're at a job site somewhere and there's some kind of an emergency. And if you've got a team that's been completely micromanaged and all of a sudden the boss or the foreman of the job isn't there and you have a major emergency, a water main breaks, a piece of building collapses or something goes. Really wrong that needs a bold action to solve the problem and people will sit around and wait for to be told what to do Maybe they'll be making a phone call. Hey, the water main broken or you know this pipe broke and we've got a serious problem

We got a gas leak whatever. What do you want us to do? And because it's going to require oh, by the way, we're going to have to shut off water. It's going to shut off the water to the whole block or it's going to shut off the gas the whole block. It's going to cause a disruption here to to to you know the residents in this area or or whatever and but they won't take that bold action because They don't, they haven't been trained. They haven't been, they haven't lived in a culture where taking bold action is rewarded. Even, even by taking minor action is rewarded, right? That's how you build up the trust. That's how you get people to take bold action eventually is you let them take small actions. And when they take small actions, you praise them for it. If they take a small action and the outcome is bad, which will happen because that's how we learn, we learn by making mistakes.

If they take a small action, if someone on your team takes a small action and it ends up with a bad result and you tear into them and rip them up. part and publicly humiliate them, they're not going to take any more small actions and they definitely aren't going to take a bold action. But if when they make a mistake, you say, you know, if they make a decision and there's a bad outcome and you come back to them and say, okay, look, here's the outcome that happened. Not a good outcome. I'm glad you made a decision, but here's how we can improve what you do next time. And by the way, let's think about what the cost of inaction would have been, right? So sometimes any action is better than no action. And in fact, that's off in the case. And so you say, look, I'm glad you made a decision, which is definitely better than

no decision. And here's how we can improve your decision-making process for next time. Yeah, that makes sense. I suppose in the water main example, it's like, all right, well, we shut off the water to the whole block. Now everybody's pissed and we have some sort of regulatory fine because we turned off the 25-story building next to us water. Yeah, I suppose I could have used the different valves that would have just shut off our area, but I wanted to make sure the thing wasn't leaking. I could have just left it on. Right. And then we would have all been screwed. Yeah. Then, and then, okay, you're doing math in your head, right? What's, what's more expensive? The regulatory fine that we're going to get hit with or the damage that we're doing to the construction project that we're actually

working on right now. And that's, that's a math you got to figure out really quickly. And maybe, maybe you did the math wrong, right? Maybe you didn't understand the strategic objectives and the strategic overlaying of the whole situation where it might be, if I'm a bad leader, I might not have told you hey Jordan one of the most important things we've got on this whole job is to keep these people in this 25 story building next to us we want to keep them happy because we're trying to get a job with them in the future that's what we're trying to do they've got a project that they're going to run and we want to make them happy if you'd have known that you would have made a different decision you know what we're going to do our best to maintain this water but

we're not going to shut them down yeah we'll pump it out so these are all these things that you learn from but again if you blow up and you rip someone apart because they made a decision you're you're creating a culture of indecisive people that wait and don't make decisions. You said before you need to stop being the easy button. So instead of like, hey, this water main broke, what do we do? Call Jocko. Oh, okay.

Hey, what do you guys want for lunch? I don't know. Call Jock. Ask him. You got to turn that off. But I think then you'd mention also that it can swing too far in the other direction. You get leaders that are two hands off and you end up with lack of coordination, lack of vision, people overstepping the bounds of authority and kind of just probably too many

chiefs, I guess you would say, and focusing on the wrong priorities, as you'd mentioned. But that leads into this concept that you discussed. I'd never heard before called leadership capital. And I would love to discuss that a little bit because this concept does show up a lot in one form or another in the book. And first of all, tell us what leadership capital is and then how it's used. Well, basically, as a leader, you got a bank account of capital that you can use to make things happen. And it's, it's, it's, it's one of those things that when you think about it, you realize it's true. So I want my team to do 10 things, right?

Some of those things are really, really important. Some of them aren't important at all. If I expend a bunch of my leadership capital on things that aren't important, then when it comes time to ask my team to do something that's really important, I might not have enough leadership capital in the bank anymore. And they, they might, they might blow me off. right that it's it's similar to crying wolf right if everything is a priority and I'm yelling it and making sure that you do everything perfectly the way I want it every single time well the

things that are really important you won't know the difference between something that's really really important and something that's maybe not quite as important and that's a problem so I mean the case that that's talked about in the book is a leader that's demanding that no phones in this meeting right no phones in this meeting no phones in this meeting and well see He's the he's one of the guys running the strategic meeting and and he's no phones in the meeting well three minutes into the meeting or whatever the CEO It pulls out his phone and starts checking his email because they're in charge of a bunch of money the CEOs got things to do and of course once the CEO pulls out his phone The other guys start pulling out their phone and next thing you know the person that's running the meeting kind of loses his mind oh this is crazy I told you no phones and

He invested all of his leadership capital into not having phone and it turned the whole meeting just went south because he's concentrating on something that's not important You know, it's this and the other example that we talk about is You know, I was very strict about uniforms. Yeah, the patches the patches and the uniforms and being in good uniforms So when we were deployed overseas in Iraq when I was a task unit commander it was listen We're gonna be working with the army we're gonna be working with the Marine Corps We need to be in a squared away uniforms. We need to look professional The Army and the Marine Corps absolutely judge people on how they look.

And that makes sense because if you can't put on a uniform, if you can't complete the simple task of putting on a uniform correctly, how can I expect you to operate effectively out on the battlefield? And so I knew that. Now, in the field teams, we have a very bad reputation of how we... Beards. Beards and jeans. Beards, jeans, patches, hats, mixed match uniforms, civilian uniforms or civilian

camouflage. you know, hunting pants and just the most random rag-tag-looking bunch of hoodlums you can imagine is what, too. And in the SEAL teams, we don't really care because we know that, you know, if you've got a pair of boots that works really well for you and they fit your feet right and they breathe right and they're comfortable, that's cool. We want, I want you to wear those. The Army and the Marine Corps doesn't necessarily think that way. They think, hey, look, this is what we do. This is how we do things. And so, and that goes through the whole uniform.

So for us it was like, okay, I told the guys, look, we're going to be in squared away uniforms so that we can gain a good reputation with the Marine Corps and with the Army who we're working with. So the priorities were set. The priorities were set. Now, the story in the book is about the patches, which is, you know, along with wearing mismatched uniforms, once it was like, hey, you got to wear the right uniform. Then guys, I said, okay, well, you know what we can do is we can get some cool patches, right? Little Velcro patches and put them on their uniforms and they would be all. kinds of random mostly pretty funny things but you know skulls and daggers and then little jokes and little one-liners and quotes from movies and just dumb stuff and eventually you know i told the guys

no patches and laf the platoon commander that worked for me who wrote the book with me and and his compadre the other platoon commander commander a guy named set they got together and decided they really wanted to have patches sure and Of course, they didn't tell me about it. Yeah, they didn't want you to know. They went behind my back. They disobeyed the direct order, right? Oh, man.

And they had patches made, and they smuggled them overseas. And what they were doing was, what they were doing was when they would leave the wire, when they would leave the gate to go on an operation, if I wasn't going on the operation with them, when they'd get outside the gate, they would have their patches with them, and they'd get on the radio and make a call. Patches on. And so then they'd pull out their patches and put their cool guy. Task Unit bruiser patches on. And that would have been fine, and they would have gotten away with it, but they went on an operation where there was an embedded combat photographer, and the embedded combat photographer took a bunch of pictures of them, and then sent me the pictures to have the pictures cleared.

And obviously, when I saw the pictures, I saw all my guys wearing unauthorized patches. It was like a big Lobowski quote in the writer-din-end or something. It was actually a Mad Max quote, and the other one was from a country-western song, Big Balls in Caltown. So these are the patches. And so I see these patches. And Leif, of course, thinks I'm going to crucify him. Right.

Because he, I told him specifically, no patches. And he actually, you know, premeditated, right? This is premeditated patch smuggling. First degree patch smuggling. First degree patch smuggling. Premeditated patch smuggling. And doing it completely behind my back with the whole task unit. And so then he thinks,

I'm going to, you know, just kill him, crucify him, fire him, whatever. And to his surprise, I didn't say anything. And a day went by and I didn't say anything. And two days went by and I didn't say anything. And three days went by and didn't say anything. And he realized that I wasn't going to say anything. And, you know, when we got back from deployment, we talked about it. And the reason why I didn't say anything, there's a multitude of reasons.

Number one, I was already asking these guys. all of them to risk their lives, risk being blown up, risk being wounded, risk being killed every single day. I was asking them to risk all that. I was asking them to conduct these incredibly hard operations. I was asking them to be dehydrated and hungry and in the field for two, three, four days at a time. And I was asking them to act professional all the time. And they were doing this massive planning cycle. I was asking always. lot of these guys. So for me, to not only ask them for all that, but also to say, okay, on top of all that, I want

you to make sure you don't wear these little patches. Don't wear the patches. Right. I would have been investing leadership capital in something that in the big picture. Didn't really matter. The patches, they were uniformed. The patches were actually desert colored. They matched our uniforms.

So it wasn't that big of a deal. And I also knew that if the guys were hiding the patches when they were around me, then they would also be hiding the patches if they were around any senior Marine Corps or Army officers that would be if that might be offended and so I let it go. So I didn't invest my leadership capital and something that didn't matter Instead I invested my leadership capital into things that did matter and this is one of those dichotomies the other example in the book is that I I told the guys that they had to do. know how to program their own radios themselves, which is something that it might not seem like a big deal, but in the SEAL teams, in a SEAL team, you got a radio man and you just have him program your radio for you. And if it breaks, you just give it too many fixes it or reprograms.

But it's kind of like not knowing how to use your phone. It would be like that. Yeah. It would be like, okay, what if you're now don't have a radio man with you? And that's the way it was in Ramadi. We were in small elements, and sometimes you might not have a radio man with you. And so if your radio is not working, you're going to need to know how to reprogram it yourself, especially in this case because we had to talk to the army and the Marine Corps, which took a little bit more understanding of the way the radios worked. And so I told the guys, you have to know how to program the radios or else you can't go on missions. And I checked them to make sure.

And so that was a situation where I allowed no slack whatsoever. You will know how to program the radios. No slack. It will happen. I invested leadership capital in that. But with the patches, it was an example of where I allowed slack. And that's an example of where you want to put your leadership capital. And that's kind of what the definition or that's kind of what the meaning of it is.

Plus, you punish Leif enough. Probably he didn't sleep for four nights. He was worried. He's like, when is it coming? It's coming to night. He's going to come in the middle of the night. How do you know when somebody needs to be coached upwards and like, all right, we got to work on this guy's skill set versus, look, I got to fire this guy. He's not going to make it.

You get an example in the book of a guy who, it seems like you just went through a lot trying to get him up to speed. Yeah. you're going to that that's what you do right as a leader you're going to invest you're going to coach you're going to mentor you're going to train you're going to re-explain things you're going to make sure that you're doing your job as a leader to ensure that they can do their job and after you reach a point where you say okay i've invested i've done everything i can i've i've put all the effort that i can as a leader where i'm now starting to take away from my other responsibilities i'm now not spending any time with anyone else because

I'm investing all my time in this one guy that's really having problems. Well, when you start going in that direction, well, now you realize that you have a person that's incapable of doing the job. And if you have someone that's incapable of doing the job, you have to get rid of them or you have to put them in a job that they can handle. And that's really challenging because we as leaders, that person's part of my team. We develop a relationship. We develop loyalty.

And so I have loyalty. If I have loyalty with you, Jordan, and you're part of my team, I want you to win. I want you to succeed. I want you to do well. and so and I coach you and I mentor and I invest in you and when that doesn't work out especially and this is another reason why we put this in the book because if I take extreme ownership of things right and Jordan's not doing the right I'm your leader and you're not doing the right thing that's my fault and I need to do better I need to train you better but there is a point where the loyalty that I have to you gets trumped by the loyalty that I have to the team because if I'm investing all my time into you and you still can't perform your duties well guess what there's other everyone else on the team needs you to perform your duties is well. So if I allow you to continue to not be able to perform your duties, I've got a problem. And it's not just affecting me and it's not just affecting you. It's affecting the whole team. And so what I have to do at that point is get rid of you. It's got to be a tough calculation, especially because

similar to firing anybody from a career, if you get rid of somebody from a team, they don't, they don't just go to another one, right? They're done. Yeah, and it depends on the circumstances of the situation. If a person has a bad attitude, yeah, they're done. If a person lacks humility, and they say, I shouldn't get fired, I'm perfect at this job. They're not going to fix themselves. If you have a person that's humble that says, you know what, I did my best and I can see it's not good enough and I really want to make it work and I'm going to put every effort I can into squaring myself away, that person's probably going to get another shot and, you know,

they'll get recycled and sent back to another team and go through some more training and hopefully get up to speed and maybe they will, maybe they won't. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Jocko Willing. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com slash advertisers.

We also have an Alexa skill, so you can get inspirational and educational clips from the show in your daily briefing. Go to jordanharbinger.com slash Alexa or search for Jordan Harbinger and the Alexa app. Now for the conclusion of our show with Jocko Willink. What kind of jobs are there that people mostly have trouble with? Because it seems like learning how to program a radio or being a radio man, Like, anybody can kind of maybe learn those technical skills with enough drill. The problems that people have is being overwhelmed in pressure situations.

That's the biggest problem. So you're moving down a hallway. There's people shooting some munition at you. There's targets moving. There's tactical decisions that are being made and that need to be made. And a lot of times in the SEAL teams, there's a tactical decision that's being made by the person that's in the situation. So if I'm a platoon commander, an assault force commander or a task, unit commander I'm I'm in a building we're taking down a building well I'm on the first floor

and there's a guy on the third floor looking down a hallway and he's on his first deployment he's very inexperienced and he's got to make a decision of which way to go down that hallway and by the way people are shooting people are shooting machine guns there's there's smoke in there there's crash grenades going off there's a lot of chaos and mayhem and if you don't have someone that can go at that moment okay we need to move left follow me that's going to be problem And that's generally it's someone that can't make decisions and pressure situations. Yeah, I think that's a skill that you have to build over time as well. I did a bunch of charity events with this military charity.

So the Delta guys or retired Delta guys took us in a building of a firehouse and one of those training firehouses and taught us how to clear it. And at the end, we're like, oh, how did we do is a bunch of business guys? And they're like, you all would have been dead before you got in. Yeah. Because they're shooting at us from the roof and we're like, I don't know, scattered out all over the place. And then the second one, we were all clumped together. And they're like, yeah, I just would have thrown a grenade in your general direction. You all would have died.

So those are the technical skill. That's the technical skill that usually the frontline seals would be fired for. The seal leaders, of course, and I talk about this all the time, the seal leaders would generally get fired because they lacked humility. Because that's just the ultimate problem for a leader when they don't listen to anyone else. They don't make any adjustments. They don't listen to their subordinates. They don't listen to their peers. They don't listen to their bosses.

They think they know everything. And when you have that attitude in combat, it's going to be a problem. Yeah, you have that story towards the end of the book where there's, I think he was a regular army. And he just wanted to drive straight into town on this road that had like a hundred percent chance of getting IEDs and disabling vehicles. And he would not listen to anybody. And he was new to town. And it was like a terrible combination. Yeah, that's a bad situation.

And that's why humility is so important. If you can't be humble and can't, you know, you've got some guys that have been on the ground in Ramadi for 10, 12, 14 months and they're advising you, that's not a good plan. I would listen to them. I would listen to them. But if you don't, if you're not humble, if you lack the humility to think, you know what, these people that have been here for a long time, they might know something that I don't. I don't care. I'm not listening to them. That's going to be a problem.

This is random, but it just came to mind. What happens if somebody loses a radio? Like it just falls off. I don't know if that's even possible. Or maybe they get injured in their radio and somebody grabs it. Can that person, how do you deal with that? The way the system is set up, and I don't want to say too much about it, but the way the system is set up, if a radio gets lost, it can be made so it can't communicate anymore.

So it's all digital in there to like, all right, radio number 27 is off that. It's going to be non-functional. Gotcha. So an enemy could get a hold of the radio, and within a very short period of time, the radio would be just a brick. Nice. Yeah. I wondered about that because it's got to happen at some point. Yeah, no. And of course, we try and prevent it. Sure. But there is sensitive gear in a combat situation. You can lose some sensitive gear and there's a little form that you fill out and you say this is the gear we lost. And we've filled out a few of those. It's classified though. Can't tell you what it is. But yeah, I think handing that in must feel pretty terrible. Handing in that form? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a bummer. Yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of like losing your wedding ring or something. Like, hey, honey. I don't know what. happened to it, it's gone. Yeah. I mean, there's sometimes where, you know, my guys were getting shot off of targets and they left some stuff behind and it was like, okay, you know, I get it. Sometimes there was a little bit of negligence on the guys, which is really whose fault is that? It's my fault.

It means I didn't, you know, explain it and make it clear enough and inspect occasionally to make sure that the procedures were being followed to secure the gear. So when you're in charge, it all comes back to you. Yeah, a lot of responsibility. I mean, hence the title of the original book. One concept that I thought was super useful in the business world is that everyone has to lead. And we kind of touched on this earlier, but a team can be really hamstrung if the performance relies really on one or two leaders. And the example in the book is Big Waltz, super effective leader.

You took them out of the picture, thankfully in a training exercise, and everybody just kind of sat there getting shot with paintballs or whatever, some munitions. Yeah, that's a classic example that we would do when I was run. the training the advanced training for the seals is if they had a really effective leader and we'd watched you'd see an effective leader and it's very obvious to see every call is made by him every direction is given from him and as I'd see that it's a oh looks like he's doing a great job which means he's going to die next and so then you know we have paintball or whatever we'd walk up and said you know in that case it was like hey big Walt you're dead lay down and then what happens is No one's making decisions.

No one's making the calls. And everything just turns to total chaos. And everyone gets murdered. Again, it's training. So it's paintball murder. But everyone gets murdered by the opposing force, which is actually other seals that are dressed up like bad guys. My seals and my cadre from my training department would go and just slaughter the seal platoon. Because they're not making any decisions.

And there's no one leading. And then, you know, in that example, this was a great life was actually the executive officer at the city. the operations officer at the seal team at the time that we put big Walt we killed big Walt and then we let everything kind of go to crap for a little while and then just just to it was so poignant to go up to big Walt and say okay big Walt you're you're back you're alive again and big Walt springs up immediately starts making decisions immediately starts making calls immediately starts giving direction and within within i'm serious within like 30 seconds the guys are now doing the right things.

And it was great to bring that back to the debrief and say, okay, guys, what happened when Big Walt was down? Nothing happened. No one did anything. Yeah. And what happened when Big Walt came back to life? He took ownership. He took charge.

He made things happen. And you guys got the problem solved. Big Walt, is Big Walt never going to die? Is Big Walt indestructible? Is Big Walt bulletproof? The answer to all those questions is no. And so someone else has to be ready to step up. And we're going to keep killing Big Wall.

until we see the leadership start to step up. So you did it just to highlight because you brought them back in. I was like, why bring them back in? But really you can't go, oh, yeah, the situation, a lot of different things that change is like, no, the only variable that changed twice was we took out big walled. It's so obvious. And, I mean, that's one of the best things about my last job in the SEAL team's running that training was I got to do this over and over and over and over and over again, just platoon after platoon after platoon after platoon, putting them through training. So I got to see this. I knew.

I knew exactly what would happen. I knew what happened when I killed him. Well, I didn't because sometimes no one else will step up because there's a good leader there. And the person that's a good leader is generally a good follower. So if Big Walt's making all the calls, cool. I'm just going to follow Big Walt. He's doing a good job. But if Big Walt gets killed, okay, now I'll step up.

So occasionally I wouldn't know. Or actually, I wouldn't know if there was a really dominant leader, you might not know if there was another dominant leader there or another couple dominant leaders there and believe me we'd we if we if another leader stepped up underneath big wall and started making calls we'd kill that guy eventually and see if there's someone underneath him and if some if that guy someone stepped up again we'd kill that guy because we wanted to as you started off we wanted everyone on the team to be able to lead and that's what you need now that also like I said good leaders are generally good followers as well so you wouldn't always see it but seeing it over and over again I can tell you without question

When you have a good leader and the good leader goes away, if no one else steps up, there's going to be problems. And if there's a problematic situation anywhere, guess what? You insert a good leader into that situation, the problem is going to get solved. That's leadership. It reminds me the boat team story from Buds and extreme ownership where they, I think you'd switch the worst teams, cap in or whatever with the best one and they ended up winning and losing. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, actually, the boat crew that was winning didn't end up losing the boat races. Now, they came in second. You know why? Because other leaders in the team stepped up. Other leaders in the team stepped up. And they had seen how to lead. They had seen how to work together as a team. And so they continued on.

But the other boat crew, which had been losing, one. And that's because they had a good leader inserted in that situation. So you took athletic ability or endurance or whatever completely out of the equation. Leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield. So this decentralized command where everyone has to lead, the way that you illustrate that is by throwing people into the deep end and then taking out the one guy who's the best swimmer sort of so to speak well that's that's one thing but decentralized command when you start the other thing that you usually see the problem with decentralized command that you usually see is someone is trying to control all the

decision making that's the problem that you usually see now big walt is controlling all the decision making because he's a dynamic personality but sometimes in the corporate world you see the same thing you see someone sitting there running every single meeting they're every single decision, no one down the chain of command is allowed to step up and show any initiative whatsoever, and they eventually just don't have any initiative. So that's why decentralized command is important, because when you have people on the front lines that can't make decisions on their own, that can't decide, you know, to shut off the main water valve, that can't decide to adjust pricing, that can't decide to skip some part in the manufacturing process because we're going to catch

it in the backside because we need to get this done right now. If you don't have people that are on the front lines that can make decisions, decisions and every single decision that they make they have to run up to the top of the chain of command to get permission They can't react quickly enough and when you can't react quickly enough you get ambushed You get flanked you get maneuvered on by the enemy and you get killed How do you design training that's hard enough that the team learns and comes together? But isn't so hard that people are just getting Wipeed out every time That's that that's a challenge and again this is the dichotomy right? And we have a chapter about it in the book you want to push them so hard

that they feel massive amounts of stress but at the same time you can break them right you can break them and where they're not learning anything and they get a defeatist attitude of no matter what we do we're going to lose and so I was always I mean I aired on the side of I wanted the training to be too hard that was where I aired but I could also see when I'd see a platoon or a task unit start to fall apart and now I realized I'm breaking them they're not getting anything out of it And that's when I'd back off and let them do some runs without much interference. Let them do some runs where they win. Let them get their confidence back up.

Let them see how it's supposed to be. Let them see how it's supposed to feel. And then I'd start turning up the chaos on them again. And the funny thing is I'd have a task unit or I'd have a platoon that would say, we're not learning anything because we're just getting our asses kicked every single time. And I'd say, hey, you remember the run that you did, the iteration that you did three iterations ago do you remember that and they'd think about it and they'd say oh yeah and I'd say well what went wrong on that one because and they'd say oh well nothing went wrong and we won and I said

and you barely remember it and I'd say why is that yeah I said what did you learn and they'd say well we didn't learn anything and I'd say okay that's why we're kicking your ass every time because we want you to learn and when we'd throw and this was all scheduled you know I'd schedule the the heat would be scheduled hey this run they're going to get crushed this run they're going to get crushed this run is going to be This run, they're going to get a freebie. Nice, easy run. Let them get their mind straight.

Let them almost like a really good, solid rehearsal so they know what it feels like. Then we're going to amp it up a little bit. Next one, we're going to crush them. I'd know exactly. Now, I would modulate that depending on how the task unit of the platoon was doing. If they were doing great, I'd turn up the heat really quickly. If they were having trouble, I'd maybe back off a little bit. Let them try and sort themselves out.

but it was a great process and I was so lucky to be able to have that job and do that job it was a great leadership laboratory is what it was. Yeah, I would imagine do you have any sort of rules of thumb like all right right before lunch we're going to let them win so they go in or like before they quit for the day

so that they feel good about it going into the rest of the day or you're not thinking about that kind of thing? Literally we would be looking at their performance and thinking okay how is it a performance and what is going to help? What is going to teach them the most right now? Because sometimes you give somebody an easy run and they immediately get arrogant. Yeah, and then when you get arrogant, as I said, if you lack humility, that's a problem.

So then you're going to get put in check really quickly. Sometimes you have someone that crushes things and that and okay, you can handle more. Cool. We're going to give you more. The discipline but not rigid dichotomy was really interesting as well because it seems like discipline and rigidity almost go hand in hand. Like always get up at 4.30 and lift. always study for your math exam or whatever the stuff is in your inbox, I can only imagine.

How do you strike the balance? And the example in the book to business was these sales guys that knew their scripts word for word and just went and delivered their script word for word, which as a former sales guy, I can imagine, is awful. It's like when you get that phone call and the person's like, hi, this is Kathy from the reward center. And you're like, I'm not really interested. Instead of going, well, hold on, I think you would be there. Just like, congratulations.

You've won it. And you're like, what are you doing? What are you doing right now? Exactly. That's the great example of, and we see it in all kinds of different businesses. It's not just sales. You can see it in any business where there is so much discipline put in. And obviously, I'm a fan of discipline. I have a book called Discipline equals freedom. And it's been my mantra for a long time. Yeah, I have a product right here. I have a product called discipline. And so I'm a huge fan of discipline. But can discipline be taken too far? Yes, it absolutely can. And if you put, so much discipline on your people and so much rigidity on your people that they stop thinking that is going to be problematic and that's that's why even discipline as much as i love discipline and as much as i believe discipline is the root good quality of all good qualities even discipline has to be balanced how do you get there because usually the pendulum swings in the other direction right

you want to get the sales guys so good that they maybe could recite that script word for word and then dial it back somehow. Yeah, well, I think what you do is you need to get people to understand things, right? They need to understand. Because let's say, let's take your example of a script. You're writing the script because it's a good way, you're kind of capturing the best way to provide this information, right? But once you have that information provided, then an individual has to learn how to modulate

that information based on feedback that they're getting from a client. And it's the same thing you do as a leader. right as a leader you step up in front of a group of people and you're gonna pass a message well depending on the reaction that you get you're gonna have to modulate that one way or the other you might have to give more detail you might have to give less detail you might have to be louder you might have to be quieter you might have to break people in a smaller groups there's things that you have to do as a leader to modulate the way you communicate with other people and but if you don't have the

baseline right if you don't have the facts it's gonna be hard for you so I I look at Like in that example, the script is the facts. That's what you need. You need to know this information. Once you know the information, then you need to have the freedom to maneuver. You know, I was talk about Jimmy Page, the guitarist from Led Zeppelin, right? He had complete freedom on the fretboard to make crazy and insane music. But the only reason he had that freedom to do that is because he was highly disciplined

for many, many decades of practice and worked as a studio musician. playing the notes that he was told to play the exact way that he was told to play them. And when he had the discipline background to understand the script of the notes and how they fit together, when he was able to let loose, he was able to make Led Zeppelin.

Yeah, yeah, can't argue with that. Yes. You mentioned leaders and followers and how it's just as important to be a good follower. And the example, or one of the examples, is this rock, is it rock scissors rank, or rock paper rank, something like that?

Rock, What is it? Rock paper, rank. What do you say? Rock paper scissors? Yeah, it's rock paper rank. That makes sense.

Yeah, the idea that this erodes trust among the team. Can you explain that a little bit? Well, it's the thing of, okay, Jordan, here's what we're doing, and you're going to do it my way, and you don't have any say in it. Oh, and you, you want to debate with me? No, the debate is, I outrank you. I win. And the minute that you pull your rank as a leader, the minute you pull your rank,

you've really lost. You've really lost. because now you're going to go out and you're not going to execute the thing I told you to do, the action I told you to execute, you're not going to execute it with the same vigor you would if it was your plan or something you'd come up with. Sure. So the minute I'm pulling rank on people, doing a bad thing as a leader.

There's three elements in the book of a good relationship with your boss. I'll refresh your memory because I know you wrote this a long time ago. You might already remember these. I don't know. But they trust you. They value and seek your opinion and guidance. And they give you what you need to accomplish the mission and then let you go execute that. And we'll throw that in the worksheet for people who are listening.

That'll be in the show notes as well. How do we begin to create that type of relationship? Let's say we've always been kind of an A-hole and we're like, look, you're going to do this because I'm your manager. How do we develop that trust and start to fix those relationships? I'm not quite sure how you paired those two up because the one that I'm the one that I'm, one that you mentioned, the way that I want my boss to view me, that's up the chain of command. That's how I want my boss to view me. I want my boss to trust me, to listen to what I say, and to give me what I need, and then allow me to

go execute the mission. Oh, so I'm looking at it from the other, I'm looking at it backwards. Yeah, like this is what I want my boss to think of me. And I always say that, look, I worked for every different type of boss that you could imagine while I was in the military. I worked for guys that were awesome, incredible leaders and tactical geniuses, and I worked for guys that were complete nightmares and tactical idiots. And regardless of where my boss was on that spectrum, my relationship with all my bosses was the same, which is they trusted me, they listened to me, and they gave me what I needed to do my job. And then they let me go do my job.

So I had to build that relationship. So to your question of like, how do I build that? Well, it's different how you're going to build that. And if you've got someone that's a great leader and they're a tactical genius, well, all you have to do with them is kind of show that you understand the mission, show that you're competent in getting the things done tactically and give them what they want and go out and perform. That's great. You'll build that relationship pretty easily. If you have someone that's a super micromanager, well, guess what? you're going to have to figure out how you build a relationship.

And the way I always tell people to build relationship with a, for instance, a micromanager, is you start giving them more information than they could ever want about what you're doing. So if I've got a guy that wants to know everything that I'm doing, I'm going to tell them everything I'm doing and then some. You know, I'm going to say, look, hey, boss, I'm going to go use the bathroom at about, you know, $0,600 this morning before I come into the meeting with you. I just want to let you know and make sure, you know, I'm being a little bit facetious here. I'm going to give them so much information that eventually they say, hey, Jocko, I get it.

just go do what you need to do. Yeah. So I'm going to build those relationships up, and that's the relationship I'm going to have with all my bosses. There's a lot of people who I think read a lot of, most of these business books, and they're looking maybe to fix a specific problem. And one of the problems that I see a lot in organizational structures,

especially in people that are really rigid with their structures, this humble but not passive kind of problem that shows up. And I assume you see that a lot, because it's an entire chapter in the book. Be humble or get humbled is a term that I, I love. Can you tell us what this means? Well, be humbled to get humbled. Actually, I said that originally on the on the podcast when I had Tim Kennedy on. And, you know, we were just talking about the nature of the world. And the

nature of the world is if you're not humble, you are going to get humbled. So that's a good attitude to have. And it's a good attitude to always think, you know, I need to stay humble. But, and this is the dichotomy, this doesn't mean that you're complete. passive and there are times as humble as you should be there are times when you need to stand up and say no no that doesn't make sense that doesn't make sense at all now where this ties into the building relationships with your bosses if you're my boss Jordan sure and you tell me to do something that doesn't make much sense right but you know what it's a little thing it's a minor thing it's not gonna cost me

a bunch of time you know what I'm gonna do it do it yeah and then you tell me to do something else maybe this one's cost me a little bit more time but you know what okay it's not that big of a deal i'm going to get it done we'll make it happen i'm going to do it then you then you give me something hey you know what this is a little bit of a problem it's actually gonna it's gonna it's gonna impact my guys a little bit and they might give me a little pushback but you know what i'm gonna do do it i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it's a little pushback i'm gonna say guys hey look we're gonna make this happen and i know it might not be clear to us right now but you know what we know what we are doing we're building trust of the boss so we're gonna make this happen we're

to do it well and then eventually jordan you tell me to do something that doesn't make sense you tell me to something to do something that's going to get one of my guys hurt or killed or you tell me something that's going to lose my my branch a bunch of money and now i'm going to stand up i'm saying hey jordan on the last thing you just told me to do i don't think that makes sense and let me explain why to you and now since i've built a relationship with you since you trust me since you know that i i get i get what you get what you want me to get done I get it done when I give you some pushback your mind is open you're gonna listen to me more than if I you know hey this doesn't make any sense you tell me do something little and I don't like it and I go this this doesn't make any sense and now you have to battle me on

something little and you battle me on something else all and then you battle me on something else little eventually you don't listen to me anymore so I build the trust I build the relationship and when I have to not be humble but I actually have to stand up and say no or ask for a different direction, then it's more accepted. Yeah, then you got people smuggling patches, and it all goes to hell from there. Yeah. I thought it was funny, there's a military version of the butt dial, which is the hot mic. Yeah, there is a military version of the butt dial.

Yeah, that's a, so if you leave your radio button press or it's like pushed up against some shoulder strap or something, usually gets pushed up against some shoulder strap or something. It's so annoying. Yeah. I could do that for like 28 minutes because that's what happens sometimes. It's so annoying. And yeah, it's a real problem. And you can't turn your radio off, obviously, because you can't hear it.

And honestly, normally it would get fixed in, you know, five minutes or three minutes, but it is a pain. And in those three minutes, when that's happening, there might be critical information that needs to get passed over the radio. And when there's a hop mic going on, it's not going to get past. So you can't talk over someone else. You can't talk over something. Well, generally it depends on where some. There's a little bit of the dynamics of the physics of the radio waves, but generally if someone's hot-miking

The fact is you can't you're not going to get any clear communication through when someone is is hot mic Oh man that's so it seems like they they should have fixed that by now those radios are probably like 10 grand each Yeah, we we were really good about we would we would we got it to a point where we very seldom would have a hot mic Generally if we had one it would be a guy that would be not from our unit right not not from tasky to bruise or someone else that was on our radio frequency that was patrolling with us because we were pretty and and how did we do that we were self-policing and we if you had a hot mic and you were uncovered it was like it was a nightmare of hazing of just you know just just just total ridicule if you if you uncovered what does that mean oh like discovered yeah yeah if you were oh so you don't even know who's doing it no you don't know who's doing it if you knew who's doing it you could just

stop the patrol and and pass the word no it's just some random person at one out of 40 that's that's sitting on their mic or that's leaning on their mic or that's that their mics caught underneath their sling or their weapon. And, you know, like I said, eventually people position their mic so that that doesn't happen. But occasionally, it would. Military butt now. This book has great stories that you can really feel. I found you can almost like smell the nasty sewage canals in Ramadi when the way that things are described.

And like these machine gunner guys, they all sound like just, you know, death metal fans with like bullets dripping off of them, walking around, lighting people up. And it's actually, it's kind of, I was talking with Jen, my wife, who read this as well. It's a miracle that more people are not injured on these missions or killed on these missions. Because every story in here is like you're just inches away from having something taken off by a bullet or falling through like a crappy built floor or having some wall fall on you. Yeah. You know, you say it's a miracle. And it is absolutely. And, you know, we had a lot of guys get wounded.

We had guys get killed and the fact that more guys didn't get wounded and the fact that more guys didn't get killed, it is, it's, it's definitely a miracle. There was definitely times where we got away with way more than we should have. And also, the guys were, you know, extremely well trained. They were extreme professionals. They took care of each other. And, you know, we were a lot better than the enemy at our job than the enemy was at their job. And that doesn't mean you get away with it all the time. That doesn't mean, you know, combat, you know, it's something else I say in the new book is if you cut wood, you get sawdust.

I mean, when you cut, when you're in combat, it doesn't matter if you do everything perfect. You can still take casualties. The bullets don't care if you trained hard or not. The bombs don't care. The IEDs don't care how well you plan that mission. That IED has been sitting there for however long, and if someone steps on it, it's going to maim people. people and it's gonna kill people and that's one of the horrible things about about combat is there's a there's a there's a there's a certain level of risk that

cannot be mitigated it cannot be mitigated no matter the only way to mitigate completely mitigate all risk from combat is to not engage in it and sure that's great option if there's no evil in the world but you know unfortunately there is evil in the world and therefore there's war. I don't think a lot of us civilians realize that you're like 25 yards away from some of these enemy combatants. There's a towards the end of the book, there's a time where you and Chris Kyle are on some sort of mission Ramadi. And there's like a insurgent kid. I imagine all these guys are kind of young. And they're just like right in front of you. Yeah. And that's actually

Laif. That's actually Laif. And Chris was Laif's point man. And so yeah, they were patrolling at night. And sure enough, you know, that's the way it is. Um, that's one of the things about the urban combat that is very challenging is that you can be separated by the enemy by one wall by a concrete wall that's, you know, six inches thick. That's it. That's, that's one of the things that. And also the enemy can be anywhere around you. And that's another thing that makes urban combat very challenging is it's, you have to react to things very, very quickly because you won't see someone until you turn a corner. Whereas in the desert, you can see something. You can see something. You can see. someone a little further out. Yeah, I think a lot of us, you know, when we watch the news or whatever or watch whatever is on TV or YouTube, we don't realize that you're that close because we only see as close as Geraldo Rivera or whatever wants to get close to the action. He's 150 yards away sitting with some guys who are maybe shooting or looking over some

building wall at combatants that are the size of an ant on the screen because they're so far away. We don't really know how close everyone really is. That stuff is terrifying. And that seems like an emotional, kind of an emotional skill set that you have to have where you don't just freak out the second you see somebody that close to you with an AK-47 right in your face at that point. Yeah, well, again, this comes back to the training.

This comes back to the extensive training that we go through. And, I mean, the other thing is the guys got used to combat. I mean, it was a daily, a daily situation. It wasn't like, hey, we're going to go, we're on deployment for six months and the guys got in a firefight. It was like almost a daily scenario where it was gunfights with the enemy. And so by that point, the story that you're talking about, by that point, that was pretty deep into deployment. It actually wasn't that deep. It was probably a couple months into deployment.

But by that point, you know, Leif's reaction was, okay, there's a guy there. He's an enemy, obviously. Take him out. do people usually adapt to that combat mindset? Depends on the person. It also depends, well, it depends on the person. It depends on the training. And then it also gets to a point where, you know, guys can't handle it anymore.

And that happens. You know, in the, in the Chesian war, they talk about, you know, three or three months tops, maybe four months tops, what the Soviet said someone can handle that urban combat for because the stress level is so high. I was just read another book about the front lines of World War I, again, where you're getting massive bombardment from artillery and mortars. And those guys had even shorter periods of times where if they didn't get off the front line, they were going to break mentally. So, you know, luckily for us when I talk about the guys being out in combat daily, but they would also, they'd also come back to base. they'd also come back for, you know, a couple days and be back on base in a relatively secure

environment and be able to decompress a little bit. Again, you're still overseas. We, you know, we got mortared on base. The guys that were in Eastern Ramadi, they got mortared an attack with machine guns on a fairly daily basis. But it still is relatively secure. The enemy is definitely going to be, you know, they're not going to be five meters away or 10 meters away or within grenade throwing distance.

So the guys did have an opportunity to decompress a little bit. But, yeah, you know, the combat trauma that it puts on guys can be very, very hard to deal with, yeah. Yeah, it seems like where do you, like where do you sleep when you're out for three days? I mean, you have to sleep right there. And somebody's just watching your back. Yes. Yep. You have watch standards.

Someone's up. Someone's asleep. You get the time. You know, Laif and I joke about it. Sometimes the most we'd get to sleep was when we were in the field. Because preparing to go in the field, we'd be awake for 36. hours going through the planning cycle, deconflicting with all the units we're going to work with, and then finally get to go in the field.

And it's like, okay, can you guys stand watching? I'm going to go to sleep. Yeah, finally. And I know Laif jokes about that. I joke about it, too. There's a funny picture of myself and Dave Burke, another guy that was with us in Ramadi in the Marine Corps, Anglico guy. But there's a picture of him and me, and he was the leader of his assault team. And I was, you know, I was a leader of Taskin-Bruiser.

There's a picture of he and I on a rooftop. It looks like it's about 11 o'clock in the morning, and we're both sitting there. We're both asleep. 110 degrees. It's 110 degrees, and we're both asleep. And clearly, this was probably the first time we had to rest in, you know, 24 or 48 hours. So we put our heads down and sleep. Yeah, you learn to sleep anywhere on concrete and floors and stairwells and whatever else.

The dichotomy of leadership balancing the challenges of extreme ownership to lead and win. really good. I got an advanced copy. A lot of classified stuff in there. Can't talk about it. But the rest of it is going to be out soon, so go pick it up. Thanks, Jocko. Thanks for having me on, man. So this is a great one. It was kind of cool to go fly down to San Diego and hang out with Jocko again. He was one of our first guests on the new show. He's been guests on a lot of my other stuff as well, so it was kind of cool to come back. And, you know, we're still waiting for the final, final copy of the book to come out, and there's going to be maybe some surprises. We still don't even know what the cover's going to look like. Nice. Yeah, I was so bummed. I couldn't meet you guys in San Diego for this one because I'm such a

huge Jocko fan. I loved extreme ownership and I actually, you know, incorporated that into my life every day. If I screw up, I take ownership for it. And you know that. I'm the first guy to say, yeah, my fault. But I also got to say thanks for you and Jen for going down there and sending me a jaco care package, which you can see if you go to Instagram.com slash JPD. I've got all the stuff that you guys sent me, including his new tea, which is. delicious. Ah, yeah, the white tea. I dig that too. The white tea is so good. Great big thank you to Jaco. The new book is called The Dicotomy of Leadership, balancing the challenges of extreme ownership to lead and win. A lot of great stories in there, just like extreme ownership.

Balance is kind of the battle stuff with the business stuff. And if you want to know how I managed to book all these great guests, manage my relationships, business and personal, using systems I've developed over the years, definitely check out our level one course, which is free over at Advanced Human Dynamics.com slash level one. A lot of people go, oh, I don't need to network right now, or I'll do that in a bit. I'm really busy these days. The problem with that mindset is that you cannot make up for lost time. When it comes to relationships, networking, you cannot build those relationships when you need them. And I see that problem with students, business owners, you postpone it, you don't dig the well, then you get thirsty. And once you need those relationships,

way too late. You've got to dig the well before you're thirsty. These drills are designed to take a few minutes per day, and it's the type of habit that we can ignore only at our own peril. This is the stuff I wish I knew a decade and change ago. This is not fluff. It is crucial. So that's at advancedhuman dynamics.com slash level one. And speaking of relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Jocko. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. I'm doing a lot more on Instagram these days, little videos, answering questions like I do on Feedback Friday. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you've heard from Jocko, make sure you go grab the worksheets, also linked up in the show notes, Jordan Harbinger.com

slash podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason. Yo, send me some more of that white tea to Philippo. Show notes are by Robert Fogarty. Worksheets by Caleb Bacon. Booking, Back Office, and Last Minute Miracles by Jen Harbinger. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful. That should be. every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. Lots more in the pipeline. Very excited for what's coming to you in the future. 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. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great

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