Essentials: How to Become Resilient, Forge Your Identity & Lead Others | Jocko Willink

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Jocko Willink. Jocko Willink, welcome.

**Jocko Willink** (0:21)
Thanks for having me, man.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:23)
In my view, and I think in the view of a lot of people, you embody discipline. So today, I definitely want to talk about routines, but also mindsets, but also things that you do and ways that you approach things that might not contradict but not be so obvious to people, might be a little bit counterintuitive. There are generators and projectors, and generators are people that are just from a very young age.
They realize they can impact other people. They want to create things in the world. And then there are these projectors that like to just kind of reflect on what they see. And it's not that generators are good and projectors are bad. The world needs both. That they really work in a kind of symbiotic way. But your story captures the essence of what it is to be a generator, which is that by doing certain things, you can have an impact and it feeds back to you. And it's likely that they receive something from it as well.

**Jocko Willink** (1:14)
Yeah. And where this all came to fruition, as I now piece together, as you're talking through this stuff, look, when I joined the military, you join the military and you get a blank slate. No one cares what you got on the SATs. And no one cares about anything. You're a blank slate. And then with that blank slate, it is, hey, if you do this thing, if you perform this task and you perform it well, you will get recognition. You will hopefully get more control over your own destiny, which is the ultimate in compensation for human beings, to have more control over your own destiny. You can have all the money in the world, but if you don't control what you are doing every day, or at least you don't control most of what you are doing, then it is not worth it. The reason people try and make money is so they can have more autonomy in their life.
And so in the military, it became very clear to me very quickly that if I performed well, I actually got a lot more freedom with what I did. That is when I started to realize, oh, what I am doing right now is going to impact not only what is going to happen to me in the next hour, but in the next two years, three years, five years. The more I focused on doing things that are going to positively impact my future, the better my life became.
I think that is a very huge lesson to learn that I know I did not figure out for quite some time.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:40)
I get the impression, and I think everyone gets the impression, that you are somebody with a lot of energy. And I wonder whether or not you wake up with a lot of energy and you feel like you have to burn it off with this physical activity and work and other demands in your life, or do you find that you wake up and your energy is kind of neutral and exercise and physical activity gives you energy?

**Jocko Willink** (3:02)
I would say it's both, right? There's no way I could sit here and say, oh yeah, every day that alarm clock goes off, and I'm like, oh yeah, let's rock and roll.
Certainly that's not the case. It's also certainly not the case that every day I'm like, oh God, not again. No, I'd say most of the time the alarm clock goes off, and I don't think a bunch.
Like when my alarm clock goes off, I don't debate with myself. I'm not negotiating. I just, the thing goes off, and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. Sort of robotic. Now, this much I can say, when you go and work out, you're gonna feel better. You will get energy from working out. You go break a sweat, you're gonna feel better. You're gonna get more energy from it. And look, you gotta go really, really hard to where now you feel more tired when you're done. And even that, I mean, you gotta go psycho. I'll do that occasionally, but I don't do that on a daily basis. You know, at the end of a day, if I wake up, lift, run, surf, and then I do jiu-jitsu in the afternoon, like at the end of that day, I'm tired.