Most Replayed Moment: Your Excuses Will Destroy You, To Be Disciplined Is To Be Free!

**Steven Bartlett** (0:04)
And at 19 years old, you applied to be a Navy SEAL. Okay, so I have to ask a very dumb question here, which is what is a Navy SEAL?

**Jocko Willink** (0:14)
So there's special operations, which I guess from England, this is the SAS and the SBS. So those are the two sort of units that we get compared to the most.
And so a Navy SEAL is a part of the Navy, but you're the special operations component of the Navy. And the term SEAL is actually an acronym, which stands for sea, air and land, because even though we're in the Navy, we are trained to operate in the sea, in the air. So in the sea, meaning we dive, in the air, meaning we parachute and repel, and then on the land, meaning we conduct land warfare operations. And you take all those things, combine them together, and that's what our job consists of.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:01)
I was under the assumption that to become a Navy SEAL or to be in the SAS, you had to have 10, 20 years of military service. You had to have like an established military service, and then you get some like pop up on your computer and it says, like come to this building over here. And so to hear that you applied at 19 years old, I was like, oh, I didn't know teenagers could apply.

**Jocko Willink** (1:19)
Yeah, no, I was 18 years old when I joined the Navy, and I joined on a contract that got me sent to SEAL training and it took a year to get through. So I was 19 when I finished that up. But there's always debates about, well, don't you want someone that's more experienced? And I actually loved the fact that I was basically raised in the SEAL teams. It was just awesome. It was an awesome way to grow up. It was an awesome way to spend those years of your life learning the trade that you wanted to learn. And so I thought it was awesome and I think it worked out pretty well. There is a, usually, the percentage of people that make it through SEAL training is about 20%. People that are under the age of 20, it goes down to about 5%.
So, yeah, I was one of those like small percentage of people that are very young but still make it through.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:11)
And what is the characteristics that they're ultimately testing with the design of that training? What are they testing for?

**Jocko Willink** (2:18)
Will you keep going?

**Steven Bartlett** (2:22)
In the face of whatever. Well, they call one of the weeks hell week, don't they? So, they try and simulate hell by the sounds of it.

**Jocko Willink** (2:33)
Yeah, they try and simulate hell. They actually were trying to simulate combat initially. When they created that week, they wanted to take as much combat simulation from World War II at the time and put it into a very compressed schedule so they could create these frogmen to go overseas and conduct operations because World War II was going on. And so, they needed to compress the training cycle. So they compressed a bunch of that combat simulation into, it's about five and a half days, no sleep, lots of physical activity, lots of stress, lots of pain and lots of people quit.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:11)
How many people quit in that particular week?

**Jocko Willink** (3:14)
I would say most of the people that quit probably of, it's probably 80% of the quitters quit in that week.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:25)
It's been long discussed. I think there's a book called Grit, where they discuss what it takes in terms of character traits to get through these kinds of endurance tasks. And people often think it's those that have the biggest muscles or that do the most, I don't know, cardiovascular exercise. But from what you've observed, and this is maybe a broader point about adversity in life, is there any similarities in the people that are able to get themselves through adversity?

**Jocko Willink** (3:52)
There's some internal drive that you either have or you don't have. And if you have it, you won't quit. And if you don't have it, you're going to quit. And it breaks people. The other thing is, you might be an exceptional swimmer, and you might be exceptional upper body strength, but you're not that fast of a runner. They're going to find that out. Or you might be a fast runner but a bad swimmer. They're going to find out what your weakness is. You might not like the cold. They're going to see it. You might not like the boat on your head. They're going to see it. They might see that you have a bad temper. They're going to find that, and they're going to pick at that thing to either make you come out the other side, or make you quit. It's a pretty amazing thing. It's a pretty amazing thing. It's a pretty profound thing to look at from the outside and see it, because when I was going through it, it was just sort of, I was young, I didn't care. I was going to do it. There was nothing that they were going to tell me that was going to make me quit. I never thought about quitting. If they told me to get back in the water again, let's go. They told me to put that log on my shoulder, let's go. Put the boat on my head, let's go.