The School of Greatness - 157 How to Fall In Love with Pain: The Key to Resiliency and Success with Eric Greitens

Episode Date: March 30, 2015

"We all have uneven courage." - Eric Greitens If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/157.

This is episode number 157 with New York Times best-selling author and Navy SEAL, Eric Greitens. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro-athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome everyone back. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you're having a fabulous, fantastic, amazing day today.

We've got a special guest on today. His name is Mr. Eric Greitens, and he was born and raised in Missouri, where I lived for a number of years. We actually found out we lived in almost the same block in St. Louis, Missouri for a while. He's a Navy SEAL, a Rhodes Scholar, a boxing champion, and humanitarian leader. Eric earned his PhD from Oxford University. He did research and documentary photography work for children and families in Rwanda, Albania, Mexico, India, Croatia, Bolivia, and Cambodia. He's the founder of The Mission Continues and the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Heart and the Fist. Eric was named by Time as one of the most 100 influential people, Fortune Magazine also named him one

of the 50 greatest leaders in the world. And he currently lives in St. Louis with his wife and new son, Joshua. We talk about resilience on this episode. And Eric has experienced a lot of resilience in his life, has had many different lives. And we talk about this topic and how to really gain resilience in your own life and why resilience is the key to living a better life and learning how to optimize your life. So I had a pleasure and a great time interviewing Eric. And he gave me so many gems that confirmed a lot of the things that we already talk about

here on the School of Greatness, but also gave some great insights on really how to optimize your life, be more resilient, and achieve greatness. So I think you guys are going to love this one. Make sure to take down lots of notes because I was writing down lots of notes as he was just giving me insight after insight. We'll have everything linked up. All the tips and resources that Eric covers will be back on the blog at lewishouse.com slash 157. Again, make sure to go there and share this with your friends because I think you're

going to fall in love with Eric pretty quickly, just like I did. So without further ado, let me introduce you to the one and only Eric Greitens. Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about today's guest. He is named by Time Magazine of 100 most influential people in the world. And I'm very excited to have you on. Eric Greitens, thanks for coming. Hey, Lewis. Great to be on with you, man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, man. I've been hearing your name for probably over a year now from some mutual friends. Ryan Holiday has been telling me about you for a while. He's like, you got to connect with this guy. Even if you don't have him on your podcast, you got to connect with him. You guys would really get along. I'm excited to learn more about you and share your

message of resilience, which is the title of your new book, which is Hard Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life. And you say the answer is really resilience. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think that if we want to live any kind of fulfilling life, if we want to live a happy life, you have to have resilience. And this is a virtue that we can all build. Right. Now, we've got some mutual things in common. We both lived in or you live in St. Louis. You grew up there, but I lived there for a number of years and we both lived.

I lived in the same neighborhood that you live in right now, which is kind of a cool. But what I and you're also running for governor. Is that right? Yeah, I've set up an exploratory committee to look at the possibility of running. So, yeah, we've started. And it's really cool, man. I mean, as you go around and talk with people, people are really ready for a new approach. I think they're ready for some innovative ideas. It's been great.

That's cool. And you were a Navy SEAL, and you've had some incredible experiences. The book has got a lot of stories about that experience as well. some incredible experiences. The book has got a lot of stories about that experience as well. But a quick question, since this is semi-relevant to the times, American Sniper, is it anything like what you experienced, the movie? Yes, it is a fantastically well-done movie. They had some really, really good advisors on that movie. I mean, I'll tell you, so I've got, I've got an eight month old at home. I haven't been out to see a lot of movies, but, uh, but, but, but, but, but she and I went out actually on, on Valentine's day. That was our Valentine's movie was American sniper. And, you know, I walked out of there and I, and I told her, I said, they just,

the scenes in Iraq, the buildings, the people, everything was extraordinarily well done. Now, of course, it's a movie. You can't talk to your wife on a satellite phone while you're taking a sniper shot, right? But you understand why for dramatic purposes they did a couple of those things. But it was a very, very well done movie, I thought. Very cool. And what made you decide to become a SEAL? Yeah, so it was a couple of things.

I mean, you know, I actually spent a lot of time doing international humanitarian work before I joined the military. And I'd worked in Bosnia with refugee families. I worked in Rwanda with kids who'd been kind of abandoned and abused during the genocide. I worked in Albania at a time when a lot of refugees were coming down from Kosovo. And one of the things that I recognized doing that humanitarian work was that I remember there was one day I was in Bosnia, I was in a refugee camp. And this guy said to me, he said, Listen, I'm really glad that you're here, me being an international kind of volunteer. And he said, I appreciate the fact that there's a roof over our head. I appreciate the fact that there's some food for my kids to eat in the kindergarten here.

He said, but if people really cared about us, then they'd be willing to protect us. They'd be willing to help fight for us. And I didn't know what to say to him at the time, Lewis. I mean, I was 20 years old then doing this work. But I remember later thinking that he was right, you know, that if you really care about anything, then you're willing to respond not only with compassion but also with courage. And what I saw, you know, time and again was that the world needed people who were willing to stand up and act with courage. And as a graduate student, you spend a lot of time talking, and I wanted to live my values.

And at the same time, you know, I wanted to live my values. And at the same time, I wanted to serve my country. And I joined late. I was 26 years old, but I still had these 16-year-old desires to jump out of planes and to scoop it up and to blow things up. So all of that kind of contributed. And the particular appeal of the SEAL teams was the test. As you know, it had a reputation for being the hardest military training in the world. And so that was what led me into the SEAL teams in particular. And what was the craziest part of the training for you?

That you're allowed to talk about? Yeah, the craziest part of the training was was actually the other guys. I mean, you go through the training with some with some fantastic personalities, some really wonderful guys from all over, from all over the country. And what's so neat about it is it is incredibly hard. I mean, certainly the hardest part of the training is called hell week. Hell week is considered to be, you know, the hardest week of the hardest military training in the world. And over the course of the average hell week, your average class sleeps, you know, for a total of two to five hours over the course of the entire week. Yeah. Total. How do you only sleep five hours in a week? Dude, you're so exhausted. You get to this place where you're running down the beach, you'd be running down

the beach with your crew. You stop and you fall asleep immediately and crash in the sand. That's how exhausted people get. And you just find you get your body and your mind and your spirit is pushed to a place where it's just never been before over the course of Hell Week. So that's definitely the most intense week. And it's not just physical. They do games with your mind and your emotions. And it's not just physical, you know, they do games with your mind and your emotions. And it's a it's a really intense test. Wow. And so what was the what did you say the sleep deprivation was the hardest part for you? Or was there a specific exercise or event that was, you know, the most complicated or most challenging? So you know, what was interesting? So I'll tell you about my hardest moment. So my hardest moment actually came at what should have been the easiest moment in Hell Week.

And it came when we were, I don't know, probably, you know, 65, 75 hours into the week, completely exhausted. Like I said, people just falling over, standing up. And so the instructors came to us and they said, they said, all right, you guys are going to be able to go to sleep now for the very first time. But before you do, each boat crew is going to have to do a dip contest on these parallel bars to see which crew gets to sleep first. Now, my crew lost. And since I was the officer, the leader, I was the very last person to run into these tents to go to sleep. And by the time we got in there, everybody else is already completely passed out. And then what happened, Lewis, is I laid down on my cot and I could not

fall asleep. No, why not? So my mind is kind of running and racing and I couldn't sleep. And then what happened is that I started to panic a little bit. I started to think, you know, like, what's going to happen to me if I can't sleep? You only get two to five hours of sleep over the course of the whole week. And I actually knew I was going a little crazy because the thought actually ran, thought actually ran through my mind. I actually thought to myself, I thought, well, maybe, uh, maybe if I can't go to sleep right now, maybe, maybe they'll let me take a nap later. Yeah. And so, and so, and then what happened is that I started to feel sorry for myself, right? So my mind got into this cycle of not only fear because I couldn't sleep, but self-pity. And

I started to think it's not fair. It's not fair that I was the last one who ran into the, got to run into the tents. It's not fair that I got the worst cut. It's not fair that they wrapped my right foot the wrong way. The last time I went through med, it's not fair. It's not fair that they wrapped my right foot the wrong way the last time I went through. It's not fair. It's not fair. And then what happened is like, as my mind is cycling that way, you really start going down. And I just got up. I walked out of the tent. I walked over to these faucets that we have that are about shoulder height. I turned one of them on, kind of wash some water over my head. And then as I turned back to the tent, I just said to myself, I said, Eric, I said, this test is not about you, right? This test is about your ability to be of service to the people who are asleep in that tent right now. And the minute that I took

the focus off of myself, and I remembered why I was there, all of that fear and the self-pity left. And I remember I walked into the tents and I laid down and I went to sleep. But that was my hardest moment. And I was only able to pull through it by kind of reconnecting to my sense of purpose and why I was there. So it sounds like the hardest moment wasn't actually a physical challenge. It was the mental burden you were putting on yourself. It's always that way. I mean, I can tell you the time that when we had the most people quit in the entire week was actually at the beginning of the second night. So at the beginning of the second night of hell week, what the instructors did, you know, you've gone through the first night and the whole next day. And keep in mind, like you are doing log carries, ocean swims,

obstacle courses, and you're completely exhausted by this point. And you're thinking to yourself, I am more exhausted and more beaten and more down than I've ever been in my life. And it's only the beginning of the second night, right? At which point the instructors would come out on their bullhorns and say, that's right. it's only the beginning of the second night. Oh, mentally beating you down. Right. And what they did then at the beginning of the second night, Louis, they took us out and they put us on the beach to watch as the sun was setting.

And as the sun was going down, the instructors got on their bullhorns and they started to get inside people's minds. And they said, say goodnight to the sun. We're kind of watching the sun go down. And they're like, tonight's going to be the worst night of your lives. And we're watching like this week just gets more miserable. And so they're just working on people's minds. And I can remember I saw out of the corner of my eye that something broke in the class and people started running for the bell to quit. You had to ring the spell. So they start running for the bell and you could hear it going off. Ding, ding,

ding, ding, ding, ding. We had more people quit our class at that moment than quit at any other time in all of the week. And what was amazing about that moment, I mean, you think about all of the things they ask you to do. You got to swim 50 meters underwater, run this obstacle course, swim two miles in the ocean. They tie your feet together and your hands behind your back. They make you jump in the pool. Who would have thought at the hardest moment of the hardest week of the hardest military training in the world would come when all they had actually asked us to do at that moment was to stand on the beach and watch the sunset. was to stand on the beach and watch the sunset. But what happens is, you know, and I saw, you know, our class,

we went from over 220 people in our class down to 21. Wow. And in that time, I can count on one hand the number of people who I saw quit when they were actually doing something. Hmm. Like when it was physically hard. When they started, you're saying, right. They wouldn't, they wouldn't quit when they're under the log. They wouldn't quit when they're running. They quit when they started to think about how painful something was going to

be, how difficult, how, how complicated, how chaotic, how painful something was going to be. That's when they would quit. And so what you saw was that a lot of what it took to make it through that hardship was it took some key kind of mental toughness techniques, um, that you had to learn and hone and that you could build in your mind just the same way that you can train your body. You can also train, train your mind. And that was, was what you had to do to make it through the training. I mean, I can, you know, I can't say that I can relate in any way except for the fact that I can kind of relate by experiencing three days, like two weeks of football camp, which is basically like the boot camp for football. And it's three days. It's mentally – the coaches are mean and nasty and breaking you down.

Right. and breaking you down. And we're wearing these soaked, padded, weighted pads. And we're carrying teammates around 100 yards back and forth. And we're just doing drills. And you know how hot it is in Missouri and St. Louis in the summers. With 105 degrees humidity, it's not fun. So that's the only thing I can actually kind of comprehend. I'm sure yours is about a thousand times more challenging. But for me, as a 14 year old kid learning a new sport and trying to play with these older guys, it was, you know, extremely painful physically, but mentally.

And I just remember thinking, all I got to do is get through this day and get right and then get through the next day and then one day at a time. And I knew eventually it would be over. It's just so hard. But guys were dropping left and right. Guys would quit every day. I remember that. And so what are these? If what I'm hearing you say is physically we can take the beating and the pounding as humans.

But mentally it sounds like we're less strong there. So what are some of these strategies for being resilient mentally and emotionally? Well, one of them, one of them you just mentioned, Louis, so you're obviously, you know, practicing it. I mean, one of them is a practice called segmenting, right? And what happens, what you do in segment, segmenting is just kind of a fancy word for taking something that's really hard, really difficult, and breaking it down into really manageable pieces until you have something that's right in front of you that's so small that you can attack it immediately. So if you think about the enormity of making it through a hell week, you actually can't mentally process it. It's so, it's so much. And that, that forces a lot of people to quit. If you, if you think about the enormity

of making it through all of football camp at the very beginning, it's overwhelming. So what you do in Hell Week is you'd say, I'm just going to make it to the next meal. I'm going to go from breakfast to lunch, from lunch to dinner, dinner to mid rats. And if that was too much, you say, I'm going to make it for another 10 minutes. And what you can do if you actually build a mental habit of actually segmenting all the time, what you find is that you can apply this to many different things. So as you know, in the resilience book, we're talking about things that can be used for anybody. I've worked with people who are severely depressed, right? And as you know, when people are in a space of severe depression, sometimes it's overwhelming to even think about getting out of bed, right? So what you do is you say to yourself,

Hey man, if that's too much, don't do it. But what you, what you do have to do is you have to say to yourself, can I move my toes? Yes. Can I move my fingers? Yes. Can I take a deep breath? Yes. Can I open my eyes? Yes. Can I put one leg out of the bed? Yes. Can I put another leg out? Yes. Can I put some weight into my heels? Yes. Right. Then you're standing up and what you do is anything that seems overwhelming, you immediately start breaking it down into smaller and smaller pieces. And that's just one of the, um, of the mental toughness techniques that we, that we use. What, what's a, what's another one that you have? Well, another one that, that I think people really find helpful is a practice called mental rehearsal.

And mental rehearsal is basically you're teaching people how to worry. Okay. So we live in a culture where a lot of times when people are worried, a friend will come up to you and say, Hey man, don't, don't worry. You don't need to worry about it. And that's normally really bad advice because you're, you're, you're going to worry anyway. So now you just feel bad about the fact that you're worrying, right? What the Stoics taught actually 2000 years ago, there was a practice that they called the premeditation of evils. Now let's keep in mind that their life was much, much harder than ours. I mean, if you had a buddy who is 25 years old who got a toothache, they might die, right? And Marcus Aurelius always said to himself, he was quoting Epictetus,

he said that every time you kiss your kids goodnight, say to yourself, they may be gone in the morning, right? Because that was their hard reality was that, you know, if you had a kid who was less than five years old, the chances of them making it were probably less than 50%. So what they taught though, and what we use today, and this is, as you know, I mean, you're an athlete at elite levels and a lot of elite athletes use this, a lot of others. It's a practice of mental rehearsal. And what you do in mental rehearsal is that you go ahead and allow yourself to think about things that might go wrong. But then rather than kind of thinking in a kind of endless loop of disaster, what you do is you proactively think, what will I do if this happens? How will I react? And then if another bad or

challenging thing happens, how will I react to that? And you purposefully think through these things and you imagine them all the way to the end. And what you find, Seneca said, that anybody who is ambushed by difficulty is more easily overcome by it. When you mentally rehearse something, as well as doing physical preparations, when you mentally rehearse something, you feel like you've been there before. So the SEAL team training, we'd say, all right, you know, what am I going to do when I'm swimming 50 meters underwater? I'm at 35 meters and I feel like I'm completely out of breath, right? How are you going to react to that, right? And for me, I had this thing where I'd say, I just push my, put my hands out and I'd say, stay relaxed, stay relaxed. Right. But you have to practice that mentally as well as physically. And that of course was something that we took and we could use people applied to their family life. I mean, I'd say to young guys who were having trouble at

home, we're having, you know, fights, difficulties, et cetera. I'd say, all right, let's mentally rehearse what's going to happen when you walk through the door. Well, I walked through the door and then she says this, and then this happens. All right. So what are you going to do? How are you going to react? And you actually can do this in many different parts of your life. So that's another one is the mental rehearsal technique. I love that. What is your definition of resilience? I think resilience, very simply, resilience is the virtue that helps you to get better when things are hard. It's the virtue that helps you to get better when things are hard. I mean, we all know

people who've been broken by tragedy. And we also know that sometimes those times that were most difficult for us actually led to great growth. And everybody knows like you deal with pain and you can become wiser on the other side. You can move through suffering and become stronger on the other side. You can deal with fear and become more courageous on the other side. We know this happens in our lives, but we don't often spend a lot of time thinking about how do people actually do that? What are the constituent elements of resilience that you actually have to practice in your life? Right, right. And so do you say, are you saying that you have to, you must endure struggle to acquire resilience, then that's the only way? Yeah, I think, well, the fact is, everybody is going to endure struggle, right? I mean,

it's part of life, right? And it's especially part of life, if you want to enjoy any part of the happiness of excellence, any part of the happiness that actually comes from growth, from achievement, you're going to struggle as part of your life. And so you have to find a way to build the virtue of resilience so that as you struggle, you can actually be made better by those struggles. Right. And early in your book, you say that – what do you say? You say a mantra is better than a manifesto. So why is that? And what's your mantra?

Yeah. So a lot of times what happens is, you know, when we're reading something, we feel like we got to carry all of this stuff. And the analogy that I make is to mountain climbing, right? And like when you're at sea level and you're kind of picking everything out for your pack, like you're like, oh, this is an ax. You got an ax and you get this, right? And then by the time you're at 12,000 feet

and it's hard to breathe and you're pushing yourself, like an extra pound in your pack feels like an anvil, right? And it's why mountain climbers learn how to pack so light. And what I say is that, and this is actually also one of the mental toughness pieces is that you got to have the right kind of mantra for the moment, right? And, and so that when something happens and you're in a lot of pain and they've done, they've done, you know, studies on, on which kinds of mantras work best. And usually it's not a full sentence.

Usually it's not a single word, but it's like two or three words. And it could be something as simple for somebody as stay tough or stay in the moment or remember. And remember means like remember why you're here. Remember what you're here for. And what happens is, at those times, when things are really painful, you're not going to be able to pick up a whole book, right? But what you can do is you can have mentally trained yourself to pull on something that's going to connect like 10 tenets to remember every time. Right. But just one simple thing. Yes. So so what's your mantra then? You know, I mean, it depends on what the on what on what the occasion is. I think we all we all have have different ones. But but, you know, one of the things that I do when I when I'm when I'm running and I'm pushing it, and I'm feeling like you can almost feel like your body, your mind is there, but your body is just starting to starting starting to slip a little bit. I just say to myself, strength and speed, right? Strength and speed. And for me, what that means is the strength is is mental strength and spiritual strength, not even body strength, right? Strength

is like, hey, keep your heart in this. And the speed piece reminds me it's about form, right? So it's my body. While my body is hurting, when I say to myself speed, that reminds me to keep my head up and keep my hands loose and to focus on a quality stride. And so that's, you know, that that's what that mantra triggers for me when I'm really pushing it on a run, for example. Right. You know, I'm a big believer that, you know, we're all going to experience pain. Yes. And I feel like we should learn to fall in love with pain. Yes. It's going to help us become more resilient and more fulfilled, right? Yes. So and you talk talk about mastering pain and you also say not all pain matters. What do you mean by that? Yeah. So what happens in too many lives is that

we can get distracted by, by things that really aren't that important. And it's why, you know, I write in the book about why it's so important to have a sense of purpose in whatever you're doing and why you build that sense of purpose. Whether that's a sense of vocation in your work or a sense of purpose in your service. Because a lot of times, little things just have to be ignored. You want to be able to focus on the right pain in the right way in order to grow. But if you're focused on everything that's bothering you, everything that's distracting you, then your mind actually gets pulled away from the pain that matters and the pain that can actually help you grow. Can you give an example? Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the things that I was talking about in the book was, you know,

how the process of just learning how to stand at attention when you're in the military, right? When you start to learn how to stand at attention, and it is, you know, and you're in Pensacola, Florida, and it is kind of like St. Louis in the summer, right? And it's 95 degrees and you're sweating and you're standing there. And you realize when you haven't been disciplined in this way, like it actually takes a certain amount of discipline to ignore the bead of sweat that's running down your face into your eye. Right. But that's actually what needs to be done in that moment is that you actually need to just ignore it. Like that's not what's important

right now. That's not the pain that's going to help you to grow. And that's just a distraction. And there are other kinds of pain, you know, when you're exercising, when you're working out, when you're in a creative endeavor, when you're pushing yourself, you're wrestling with how you're going to write this sentence or how you're going to paint this painting. Like that kind of pain is something that you really want to dive into because it's actually pain that's going to be productive to your growth. Sometimes other things are just distractions and you have to move past them. But people end up being pulled into, and this is another thing we write about in the book, is that a lot of times people try and get rid of distractions. And you really can't do that because there's always going to be distractions in your life. Usually what you have to do is you have to build devotion.

When you're devoted to something and you're focused on the right things, those distractions start to fall away from your awareness. And that's one of the things that, again, really helps people to build resilience. So it's kind of like the whole, what is it Mother Teresa said, she's for peace, not against war. So it's not being against distractions, it's being for being devoted. Right. And what you find is that that, for example, is what really cures boredom for people, right? Like, you know, when people feel like they're bored or they're purposeless, what often happens is that people look for spectacle. They look for a distraction.

And one of the things I was writing to my buddy in the book is I said, look, fireworks are interesting once or maybe twice a year for 15 or 20 minutes. But if you had to watch two straight days of fireworks, you'd pass out from boredom. Right. Or if you worked at Disney world where they played them every night. Right. Right. Right. There, there, there, there's, there's, there's nothing there. It doesn't, it doesn't interest you. And too often when we're feeling bored, people are searching just for a distraction, just for a spectacle. But when there's no meaning, everything is a distraction. Everything becomes spectacle. And what people actually have to have, the sense of purpose and, you know, if you want to live with purpose and courage and passion, you have to have that sense of meaning and devotion in your life.

And when you have that, a lot of those other things, again, start to fall away from, you know, the little things that ignore you, bother you, they start to fall away. You're less distracted. Yeah, exactly. What's, what's your current purpose and mission in life? Well, you know, what's really great for me. So, so there's, there's as ever, like we always have a couple of things that are going on in our, in our lives. The one that's, that's most kind of fun, exciting and challenging is that I just have my first my first child, Joshua. He's he's eight months old now, which is oh, it's fantastic, Lewis. It's just the best, man. It's absolutely wonderful. I mean, ask me at like three fifteen when he was just up at two fifteen. Right. But but but he he he's really, really great.

And, you know, one of the things that it does, of course, you know, we always have these transition points in our lives. Like when people leave college or they leave the military, you become a father, you retire, you change jobs, you take on a new venture. And there are always kind of opportunities for reflection. And it's actually been for me, I really need an opportunity to look back and reflect on my own dad. You know, I, my, so my son's name is Joshua August Greitens. August was my grandfather, my paternal grandfather's name. My dad's dad, my grandfather, he served in the Navy in World War II, kind of fought throughout the Pacific during the war. He died when my dad was six years old. And so my dad grew up, his mom was a was a shoe saleswoman raising him and his two sisters.

And my dad always wished that he had a dad. And I remember when I was growing up, you know, 430 in the morning, he'd catch the bus to work or the carpool so that he could be home when we got home and coach our teams and things like that. And so, you know, it just makes you think about how you're going to live your life. And I know for myself, if I can come to the end and know that I've been as good a father to Joshua as my dad was to me, I'll have done a good job. Right. That's very cool. Now, I haven't actually explained what the book is about. We're talking about a resilience, but it's actually made up of edited letters from you and a friend that dealt with alcoholism and PTSD when he returned home from duty. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's right. I mean, this is my buddy, Zach Walker, tough, tough kid from a Northern California logging family. He had alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder. He was unemployed. His brother had died. And he called me. He called me. I was driving down Highway 70. You remember, it runs through the middle of Missouri. He called me. I was on Highway 70 after he'd been arrested. So my buddy, the Navy SEAL kind of war hero had come home from Afghanistan and started a small business buying a concrete pumper was now the unemployed alcoholic on disability who's looking at the prospect of having his kids come to visit him in jail. And we talked. And then that night I got home and I started writing him a letter about how you, in a very practical way, how you start to build resilience in your life.

He wrote back to me. And the book is a series of 23 letters. And each letter addresses a different aspect of what you need to do or how you can build resilience in your life. Whose idea was it to share all these letters in a book? Whose idea was it to share all these letters in a book? So as I was writing with Zach, we started talking about it. And I shared them with a couple of people. And I told him about the reaction that people had.

And he was excited about it. So we decided to do this. And I talked to my literary agent, sent him a couple. And he loved it. So we decided to do it. Very cool. And one of the things you're talking about in these letters is responsibility and why taking responsibility is the first step to building resilience. Can you talk about why that's so valuable and important? Well, it's essential because what you have to do if you're going to be resilient is you have to find a way to take control of something, even when the whole world feels like it's spinning out of control. One of the things that we learned when we went through the survival, evasion, resistance, and escape school, this is the school where they teach you how to survive if you're ever taken prisoner of war.

That's crazy. Yeah. It is a pretty crazy school. They beat you and torture you and starve you and all this stuff, right? But one of the things that you recognize is that even when you're a prisoner of war, right, your freedom has been taken away from you. Your ability to stand up is gone. You have no control over the food that you, all of this stuff is out of your control, but you can still retain control over your thoughts. You can retain control over your food. All of this stuff is out of your control, but you can still retain control over

your thoughts. You can retain control over your breathing. What resilient people learn to do is they learn how to take responsibility for what they can control. It runs counter to, and the enemy of excellence and the enemy of resilience are always excuses, right? And people know that they shouldn't make excuses and stuff. But in the book, we talk a lot about why people use excuses and how they become so harmful. And what you recognize is that excuses start for a good reason, right? Excuses start because they shield people from pain. Something comes, you make up an excuse and boom, hey, you avoided something that was painful. That's what happens. And the analogy I make in the book, as I say, excuses kind of work like armor in that way. Boom, you put on a little armor and hey, you're protective. And then

you put on a little more and then you put on a little more. I said, the problem is And then you put on a little more and then you put on a little more. I said, the problem is that what happens is you imagine yourself kind of wearing a suit of armor and you can't run that well. You can't swim. You can't hug your kids. So the point is with excuses, they come and they protect you, but you also can't live a full life with them. And what's so hard about excuses is that they also, they live a full life with them.

What's so hard about excuses is that they also provide a comfort. The philosopher Eric Hoffer said, he said, achievement is so much more difficult, excellence and achievement are so much more difficult than it is to have excuses because achievement and excellence is always temporary, right? One moment you achieve something and then the next moment you achieved it, right? And then it's over. You have something else to live for. You have something else to look forward to. Whereas he said an excuse is permanent. An excuse promises permanence, whereas excellence is always temporary. And the hardest thing about excuses is that you can take away a lot of things from people. I mean, you can take away their lives. You can take away their material

possessions. You can take away everything they own. You can take away a lot of things from people, but you can't take away their excuses from them. People have to get rid of their excuses themselves or it doesn't happen at all. And so in the book, we talk a lot about how people can end up, you know, shedding these excuses and taking responsibility to build resilience. Man, this stuff's fascinating to me. What's coming up for me right now is I'm curious, from all the training you've done, all the exercise experiences that you've had, where you're under complete physical stress, or maybe you're, you know, didn't have your freedom with your body, or it was an extreme pain. What are the breathing techniques you use under those moments?

And what is going through your mind or better yet, how can someone optimize that experience of extreme pain mentally? Is it saying the mantra over and over? Is it breathing a certain way? Is it visualizing, dreaming about something else? What can someone do? So, you know, different things will work for different people in different circumstances, but there are, there are a couple of key things that you can do and you put your finger on it. Breathing is actually one of the key things. And if we, if we kind of step back for a little minute and we think about why, right, if everybody kind of remembers back to ninth grade biology, right? You think about voluntary and involuntary systems in your body, right? There are only two systems in your body, which are both voluntary and involuntary,

and it's breathing and blinking. Okay. So the, the, the kind of, the kind of crude analogy here is that the way that you breathe kind of gives you a voluntary lever that you can pull on all of the other systems in your body. The way that you breathe can actually help you to slow your heart rate. The way that you breathe can actually start to change your body. When you're fearful, when you're really afraid, what you find is if you breathe a, right, if you actually start breathing really fast, you do that, you'll actually start to feel afraid, right? Your whole body will start to feel that way. At the same time, if when you're feeling afraid, you take in a really deep breath and you, you know, one, two, three, four, and you hold it one, two, and you let it out one, two, three, four. It doesn't

mean that the fear goes away, but you've started to take control over your body. You've started to turn yourself so that you're no longer just reacting to something in a negative way. You're starting to take control over yourself and figure out how you're going to face that fear. You're starting to take control over yourself and figure out how you're going to face that fear. But what if the mind, you're breathing, you know, doing this four-second, two-second hold, four-second out cadence breathing for your body. But what if your mind is still racing and your fears are just not going away mentally and it's still controlling you? How do you, you know, what's next for the mind? Yeah, so I think there are a couple of things.

So first, one of the things that people do find is that actually the physical act of breathing can actually help the mind to focus and create some clarity. And then, right, and then you start to turn to some of the other techniques, right? Then you start to turn and say, okay, I don't have to be afraid of everything that I'm afraid of right now, right? What do I have to do in this moment? And you get to segmenting, right?

Right. And you turn to that. Or then you turn to the mental rehearsal piece, okay? Like what am I afraid of? Okay, if this happens, how am I going to positively react to it? Like, what am I afraid of? Okay, if this happens, how am I going to positively react to it? And one of the other techniques that's also really important is that it's very rare in our lives today that most people go through their lives and you're actually fearing for your life, okay?

Now, we have a body that was built to actually respond to that kind of fear, right? But it's very rare that you're running out of a burning house or that you're in combat. I mean, this is just not the experience that most people have. So one of the things that you have to do to deal with fear constructively is to actually, I mean, sometimes this might not work for somebody in a really intense moment, but one of the things you want to do is write down what you're afraid of. Actually identify exactly what you're afraid of. Because oftentimes what you find is the thing that you're imagining is far, far greater than what you're actually looking at. Right? Or you figure out, you know, what I'm'm afraid of is looking goofy in front of my friends, or what I'm really afraid, what I'm really afraid of is that, you know, I'm gonna fail, and then people are gonna

say bad things about me. And what you do when once you once you write a fear down front of you, it doesn't have as much power over you. And you start to see it in front of you. And then what happens is that you can figure out how to constructively attack it. So I'll give you just, you know, to make this really practical, you know, we have to recognize like everybody has uneven courage, right? Everybody does. So, you know, I mean, I'll tell you one kind of quick side story and then we'll swing back to fears. You know, I, when I was, was boxing, I had, I knew a guy who was once a trainer to one of the heavyweight champions of the world. And he told me that one time, uh, the champ calls them and they calls the trainer and the champion says, Hey man, Hey, I need you to do something for me. I need you to get, to get on the phone. And the trainer says to him, well, like, who, who do you need me to talk to? And the champ said, well, there's this guy he's in the other room and I need you to talk to him. And the trainer said, well, who is it? Who do you need me to talk to? And the champ said, well, it's, it's my gardener and he's got a bill and he's trying to overcharge me.

And the trainer said that he realized at that moment that the heavyweight champion of the world was absolutely terrified to confront his gardener over a bill. And he said to me, he said, Eric, this is one of the reasons why so many of these men are taken advantage of once they become champions. He said, no one would question their physical courage, their willingness to step into the ring, but they've never really had to learn how do you confront somebody over an emotional issue, a financial issue, a social issue. And so then once they become champions, they're confronted with all of these issues and they're dealing with all of this fear. And in the work I did with veterans, people have incredible physical courage.

You would kick down doors behind which they're all kind of terrorists, but sometimes people maybe they've been physically burned and they're afraid to go to a mall because of what kids might say. So what happens is we all have uneven courage. And what you when you write down exactly what you're afraid of, it doesn't mean that that fear goes away, but you start to see it for what it is. And then you can say to yourself, well, how would I test myself? How would I attack this fear? How would I break this down and try something so that I can actually build courage? Because fear really gets at you when it kind of knocks around in your, in your mind. Once you start to see it in front of you, you begin to take control. Huh? So what are the top couple of fears that you have control of because you write them down? What are the, what are the, what are the fears you have right now?

I mean, I think they go, they go through every, in everybody's life life like you have a whole series of different fears but you know you know one of them is uh obviously you know we we talked about joshua like gosh like that's it's a pretty fearful endeavor all of a sudden you're like well i am fully responsible for this uh for this life and how am i going to do this and i i actually went through this process myself you know you started I started to worry, of course, like, is he going to be healthy? And is everything going to be okay? And how am I going to know? And this, and it was actually my mom said to me when I was talking, she said, you have to stop doing that because you can do it your whole life, right? She said, you're worried about if he's going to be healthy when he's born. And then once he's born and he's healthy, you're worried about like, is he going to

learn how to walk? Okay. Is he going to be able to eat? And once he can eat, you're worried about like, is he going to learn? Like he said, you just have to have to take it day by day and do the best that you can each day. And so that was actually, you know, here I am, I'm writing a book about resilience and my mom is telling me like, this is you use your own stuff, use your own stuff and actually and actually do it.

So that's there. And then, you know, of course, you know, I told you I'm looking very seriously at running for governor. And this is a big new chapter in my life. Sheena and I have talked about this. And we want to make sure that as we enter this next phase, that we can stay true to ourselves and that we can bring the kinds of values that we want to bring to this. You know, I've been running this nonprofit organization over the course of the last seven years. The mission continues. And we've brought people together. We've done service. We've solved problems.

We've saved lives. We've taken action. We've, you know, shown responsibility. We've actually helped people, you know, helped them and their families to live better lives. And we want to do the same thing in this new venture. But of course, it's like entering any new world, any new sport. This is a lot of stuff I haven't done before. And you have to approach it with a lot of humility. You got to learn from a lot of people to figure out how to do it well. I love that. That's great stuff. In page 117, you say, the calling you hear is often the echo of your own efforts. And what I'm curious is what called you to start working with, you know, returning with veterans and working with them? Was that kind of like an aha moment for you? Yeah, I mean, what happened for me was I was serving in Iraq on my last deployment. I was

a commander of an Al Qaeda targeting cell. So our unit's mission was to capture mid to senior levels in and around the city of Fallujah, Iraq, March 28, 2007. My team was hit by a suicide truck bomb. I was very fortunate, Lewis. I mean, my wounds were minor. I was taken to the Fallujah Surgical Hospital. I was able to recover and I returned to duty 72 hours later. But a lot of my friends, one buddy of mine, Joel, who was standing, you know, an arm's length away from me, was hurt far worse than I was. He had severe head injury. I had, you know, blood all over me from him. It was just, and when I came home, I went to visit Joel and I also went to Bethesda to the Naval hospital to visit with some recently returned wounded Marines.

And you recognize in talking with all of them that they, you know, they all still wanted to continue to serve. They all wanted to go back to their units and that wasn't going to happen for a lot of them. And what was, what was happening in the culture at the time was that a lot of people were giving them things. And this was coming, let's recognize, from a place of kindness. But people were giving them free baseball tickets and free movie tickets and gift baskets and blankets and all of these incredibly talented men and women who just months ago had been pushing themselves and challenging themselves and had a mission and a team and a purpose. All of a sudden they're wondering, you know, am I a charity case now? Like, is this how people think about me? And I knew that for them, you know, the most serious injury over the longterm would not be, you know, even loss of eyesight or a limb. The most serious injury comes when people lose their sense of purpose. So yeah.

So I donated my combat pay. You've seen this with athletes who leave the game. Yeah. Right. I experienced this. I mean, I got injured. I was,

uh, you know, one moment I'm on top of the world. Yeah. I felt like a warrior playing in front of 20,000 people in the playoffs, playing arena football, uh, you know,

professional paid football and got injured, had to have surgery after this game and was in a full on cast for six months then recovering for another year and a half just trying to straighten my arm after the cast was out and had zero purpose and was completely depressed

at a certain level where I was just sitting around all day for a year and a half trying to wonder what's the rest of my life now yeah and that's and as you know it happens to athletes who leave the game happens veterans. It happens to people when they retire. It happens to people when their kids leave for college. It happens to people when their businesses fail. I mean, this sense of, you know, a lack of direction, lack of purpose, it happens in so many lives. And it's why I'm saying like, you know, this is the

echo of your own efforts, like that, that what you want to do is figure out a way slowly, maybe at first, but over time you start taking action, you begin to take control, you take responsibility. And by doing so, you actually start to build your next kind of passionate purpose, just as, just as you've done with the school of greatness. Yeah. That's awesome. A couple of questions left for you. Sure. One, how, how is Zach Walker today? He's doing great. He's doing great. In fact, I talked to him last Sunday. And so he's, you know, great father to three young kids and he's doing some hunting and fishing guiding, which is great. He's going back to school actually with a focus on doing some writing courses because he actually found that this process of writing back and forth with me helped him to create so much clarity in his own thinking that he wants to spend some more time doing that. And I think the neatest thing is that he's coaching now.

So I talked to him just that exact point we were just talking about. I said, man, you got to get out there and you got to start serving. You got to make a difference. And so he, um, he was coaching football last fall. He's coaching baseball this spring. And, uh, I'm actually going to go out in a, in a couple of weeks, he's got his, his home opener. And, uh, hopefully I'm going to be able to catch him out in California and see the team he's coaching. Very cool. Well, if you're down in LA at all, let me know. We'll catch up. That would be great.

Yeah. What was the biggest lesson that opened up for you throughout this process of teaching Zach and kind of this whole writing the letters? Well, I mean, I think, uh, for me, one of the things that was, that was really, um, important was that as I was writing this stuff down, I actually came to understand the way that, uh, philosophy works and the way that you shape your character in a way that I might not have even understood before. So, you know, one of the things that the ancients recognized really well was that you have this tremendous power to shape your character. And that if you want to be courageous, it's pretty simple. You act with courage and then you act with courage again and again and again,

and then you build the virtue, you build the virtue of courage. What they also recognized, though, was that a lot of times when we think about what we have to learn, too often we think about having to learn new things. A lot of the stuff in the resilience book is actually their reminders They're common sense things. Now, it's common sense that's survived for thousands of years, and it's become this wisdom that people draw on. But one of the things that you recognized was that what was most important a lot of times when you were studying and you want to build a virtue was that you had to be reminded of things. So if you think about what Marcus Aurelius was doing in his meditations, he was basically every day reminding himself of things that he already

knew. And what was neat here was that it actually kind of, you know, this was just one insight, but it kind of reshaped my idea about knowledge, right? It's not just that you know something, and that's fine to know something, but you also have to build a system in your life to remind yourself to use the things that you know, right? And, and so, so one of the things that we do in, in resilience, like is, is we're actually drawing from a lot of this ancient wisdom. Again, this is stuff Seneca wrote about Aristotle, lot of this ancient wisdom. Again, this is stuff Seneca wrote about, Aristotle, Aleptides, Marcus Aurelius. A lot of people wrote about this stuff, and they did so in such a way that could help them to take practical action. And that's why in the book, I've tried to structure it so that people can take what's there and then turn it into something that they can use and apply

every day. Love that. What are you most grateful for recently? Well, I mean, obviously, I'm incredibly grateful for Joshua, and I'm grateful that he's healthy. That's certainly number, number one, far and above all. I'm also really grateful. I have a wonderful team. I had a fantastic team at the Mission Continues. I got a great team here at my company at the Greitens Group. And the people who you work with and who you work around are always such a great source of energy and inspiration. And I'm really grateful

for my team as well. If today was the last day for you and you could leave three truths behind or three lessons, what are the three truths that you know that you would want to pass on to your family, your friends, and the world about all the things you've experienced in life and giving back and serving? What are those three truths? That is an awesome and deep question, man. I just feel like you would have some serious insights. So I would ask you, that is, that is a really, really awesome question. I, I, I I'll, I'll, I'll take a, I'll take a stab here. Maybe this is your next book. Yeah. Yeah. Well, who knows? This is this. This could be it. So so I'll tell you, you know, at least, you know, what's interesting is there's actually what you made me think about is there is a chapter in the book on death. Right. And one of the insights there is that you have to remind yourself that there will come a last day, right? Nobody's going to

be here forever. And, you know, the analogy that I share with my friend, Zach, as I said, death is like the sun. It infuses absolutely everything about our lives. At the same time, it doesn't make a lot of sense to stare at it, right? Right. You know, you know, the end is because so you have to you have to be aware of it. So I. You know, you know, the end is because so you have to you have to be aware of it. So I think I think, you know, the first thing that I would say is a reminder to everybody is that like our time is limited and that's what makes it precious. And so what you want to do, the first truth is to use every moment that you can this way that you can. I would say that's that's number one. I'd say number two is to be patient with yourself and to be forgiving of yourself.

You know, nobody's perfect. And you're not going to get anywhere close to perfect. But excellence is achievable. And if you're forgiving and you're patient with yourself at the same time as you're willing to push yourself and you bring that kind of combination of being patient and yet driven at the same time, patient with yourself and then driven towards excellence, I think there's a lot of richness and a lot of joy that comes out of that kind of living. And I'd say that the third thing is that, you know, in the short time that we have here, we have to find a way to be of service to somebody else. And it doesn't have to be grand. It doesn't have to be something huge. You don't have to save the whole world.

You don't have to save dozens of people. But if you find a way to make a difference in one person's life, and if you can do that every day, if every single day you can make a positive difference in one person's life, then you're going to end up living a very, very rich and rewarding life. I love those three truths. And I want to speak into the last one. Why, why is living a life of service so important for people to understand? Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's important personally, because I think that, you know, we do have to live for a purpose that's larger than ourselves. I think it animates everything that we do. I mean, if we're only here for ourselves and there really isn't any, um, any animating force in our, in our life. So I think we, we have to live for

a purpose beyond ourselves. And what you also find in a really practical way is that people who have that sense that they want to be of service, that they want to make a difference in somebody else's life, they're so much stronger when things get hard. They're so much stronger. What we saw all the time, and I saw this in refugee camps, the people who are often doing the best were parents and grandparents who had really young kids because they knew that they had to wake up every day and be strong for someone else. When we were in the SEAL teams, a lot of times the top, top best athletes, you know, high school track star, state champion wrestlers,

division one football players, international quality water polo players, like these guys, sometimes when things got really hard and they just focused on themselves, they'd collapse. The people who were able to say, you know what, there's somebody to my left who's counting on me and there's somebody to my right who's counting on me. They they were able to go maybe just for 10 more seconds or one more minute. But they could remember I'm here to serve somebody else. And it makes us so much stronger. Wow. What are some things that people can do if they feel like they're too in their own head

or they're not fulfilled because they're focusing only on themselves? What are some things that people can do to research or to take action on simple ways to serve others? Maybe they don't know where to start on how to do it. What would you suggest? Just do it. That's what I would suggest. Like you don't even need to read anything or do anything or read a resilience book. Even like all you have to do in the moment is just try,

just do something and do it, do it immediately. Like pick up the phone and call somebody who, who, you know, is, is lonely or call pick, pick up, pick up the phone and call somebody and tell them how much you appreciate what they did for you. Pick up the phone and call somebody and tell them how you were just thinking about something that they once taught you. And when you do that immediately and you say, you know, I'm going to do something really good for somebody else here. It's amazing how much better and stronger you're going to feel. And the other thing that you can do immediately, and this, this has been proven to work. It's one of the other thing that you can do immediately, and this has been proven

to work, it's one of the best things that you can do for people who are feeling depression. It's one of the best things that you can do to increase your happiness is to actually build a practice of gratitude. If in that moment when things are looking tough, you just say to yourself, what am I grateful for right now? Here I am, maybe I'm healthy. What am I grateful for? I'm grateful for my friends. What am I grateful for? That practice of gratitude leads to a tremendous amount of happiness. So you combine that gratitude with just a very simple act of service, thanking somebody, smiling at them, you're going to immediately feel better. I'm always preaching about gratitude, so I'm glad you said that.

Man, I could talk to you for days about this, Eric, and I know you've got a lot going on, so I want to wrap it up with one final question. Before I do, I want to make sure everyone checks out this book. It's called Resilience, Hard-Win Wisdom for Living a Better Life by Eric Greitens, and I'll have it linked up with the show notes here in just a second. I'll tell you guys where to get this, and make sure to grab a couple copies for friends as well. Before I ask you the final question, Eric, I want to acknowledge you for a moment for the incredible service that you've had to our nation, to the world, to giving back to veterans, and for constantly reinventing yourself. I feel like you've been through a lot of transitions in your life. and for constantly reinventing yourself.

I feel like you've been through a lot of transitions in your life. You've had many different lives, and you seem to come to each transition with grace and with ease. I'm sure there's a lot of challenges you've faced along the way, but it sounds like you've faced it with ease and of finding your new purpose to give back in a different way. So I want to acknowledge you for creating this information for everyone and for all the hard work that you've done over the years to be of service to so many people. Well, thank you, Lewis. I really, really appreciate that, especially from you. It

means a tremendous amount coming from you and I very much appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. Final question. It's what I ask all my guests at the end and it's what's your definition of greatness? Yeah, I think that someone who is great, someone who's really achieved greatness is someone who's able to look back at the end of every day and say, today, I did something worthy. And if you can do that at the end of every day, that is true greatness. Eric, thanks so much for coming on, my friend. I appreciate you. Hey, great to be on with you, Lewis. Great to be on with you. I look forward to talking with you

more. There you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Eric. Again, I had a pleasure connecting with him and I hope you enjoyed his wisdom and storytelling and resources and tips as much as I enjoyed listening to them. This is the type of content that I love. This is the type of stuff that I eat up and soak in. And it's time to become a sponge, everyone. It's time to really soak up this information. If you've been coming back to the podcast, just make yourself a sponge for these individuals I'm bringing on. Again, I'm really looking for these incredible humans who have great insights and stories that we can all relate to and then use the practical information in our own lives. And hopefully you got a lot out of Eric.

If you did, please give him a shout out over on Twitter and Facebook and share this with your friends all over the place on social media. Again, all the tips and resources that Eric shared today back at lewishouse.com slash 157. Make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter so you can get weekly updates and behind the scenes tips and videos and exercises that I share with people who are only on my newsletter over at lewishouse.com. Make sure to subscribe there. Again, if you have yet to subscribe to the podcast, if this is your first time, just

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And thanks for Eric for sharing his wisdom for me and for all of you. I hope you guys have an incredible day and you guys know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great. Outro Music