How To Build Unstoppable Confidence - Jocko Willink - #949

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
I know that you're a fan of the Thomas Sowell quote, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. What's that mean to you?

**Jocko Willink** (0:07)
That you're never going to completely solve anything in your life or in the world, and there's always going to be compromises that you have to make. And if you aren't willing to make those compromises or you don't keep your mind open for those compromises, you're going to run into some real problems. But if you look at it and the fact that you know you might put a little more effort over here, that's going to take away from some effort over there. You can't just do everything at once. So, yeah, no solutions, only trade-offs.

**Chris Williamson** (0:32)
How do you deal with the tension of feeling that other thing pull away from you, right? You know that you need to focus and you know that by focusing on one thing, another thing is going to start to drop away. But the classic overachiever mindset is, well, everything needs to be growing at all times. So there's an emotional pain of watching something stagnate or watching something fall behind. How do you try and navigate that?

**Jocko Willink** (0:57)
You just have to figure out what the priority is. And at certain times, certain things might be a higher priority right now than it is at some other point. And something else picks up. And sometimes the family needs to be the priority. Sometimes the business, sometimes the other business, sometimes the health. You're just going to have to weigh those things out and recognize that you can't do them all simultaneously at the same time all the time. It's just not going to work. So you've got to figure out, we're going to make some compromises. We're going to make some trade-offs.

**Chris Williamson** (1:24)
Yeah.
The sentence, you can be anything you want, but you can't be everything you want, is so good for that. Especially if you like novelty, like doing lots of different things. This is interesting to me. I'm curious. I want to. Yeah, okay, dude. But there is a limit. When you start to, it's the most obvious thing in the world. If you spread yourself too thinly across lots of different things, you can't be that great at all of them. You can't be really that great at any of them after you start to spin it up after a while.

**Jocko Willink** (1:50)
Yeah, and it's one of those laws of combat that I teach and used to teach in SEAL Teams and now I teach the businesses, prioritize and execute. You've got to figure out what the priorities are and then execute on those things. But you got to figure out what the biggest priority is at any given time. Like I said, whether it's this business or your family or your health, at certain times, you got to say, all right, I got to pay attention to my family right now. I can feel things are getting a little bit sketchy over there or all right, my family seems solid right now. I got to focus on this part of the business and then within the business, this particular section of the business, so you go right on down the line.

**Chris Williamson** (2:26)
How do you think about moving between planning and execution in that way? Is it something that you can do at the same time or is it really important to step back, give yourself that perspective, and then go back in to actually enact the strategies?

**Jocko Willink** (2:39)
If you end up executing things yourself, you can only do so much at one time.
If you've got something going on with your family, well, hopefully, your spouse is going to be able to take some action on that, whatever that thing is, and then you've got businesses, well, you've got departments inside your business, and you assign some plan to someone inside the business that's going to step up and take charge of that thing and run with it. So that's the fourth law of combat leadership, which is decentralized command, meaning you can't do everything yourself. You need to allow your subordinate leaders to step up and lead and make things happen. So it's mandatory to do that if you're going to execute on more than one thing in life.

**Chris Williamson** (3:24)
What about when it comes to working out what your priority should be for yourself? It seems like even that, not being able to see the wood for the trees, I'm currently in the midst of this thing. But I need to actually, is this the best place for my attention to be spent right now?