MrBallen (Former Navy SEAL): I Wasn't Sleeping, I Became A Raging Alcoholic! I Was Disowned By The SEALS! This Will Turn Your Life Around In 2025!

John Ballen (0:00)

I was in Afghanistan in 2014 as a Navy SEAL. We were in the middle of this gunfight, and a grenade came over the wall, and it detonated. And I'm waiting to either be shot by the enemy, or I'm going to bleed to death. And all that was running through my head was, and that's the way I think people should look at their lives.

Steven Bartlett (0:17)

It's so interesting, because I've never actually heard someone give that kind of advice before.

SPEAKER_3 (0:21)

MrBallen is a former Navy SEAL turned master storyteller and content creator who uses his battlefield experiences and personal failures to inspire, educate, and help people overcome challenges to achieve their goals.

John Ballen (0:31)

My family were very successful people with Pulitzer Prizes, PhD, and then there's me getting into street fights and about to get expelled. But it took becoming a colossal failure to realise that if you want to fix this, you have to start with saying it's my fault and then do something about it. But then fear becomes the thing keeping people from doing it. And it's the very select number of people in this life say, I'm going to still do that thing that scares the f*** out of me, that have the best and most fulfilling life. And so I decided to become an AVCO because it was only a really small percent that make it through the grueling, mentally torturing training.

Steven Bartlett (1:01)

And what's the similarities that you noticed between the people that made it?

John Ballen (1:03)

Two words, it's... But then I realised the reality of the job, you kill people. And I had really leaned in to being as like alpha as I possibly could be, but there were just some things that I did and I just... I struggled so, so bad. I had to face my demons.

Steven Bartlett (1:21)

What have you learnt about dealing with demons?

John Ballen (1:23)

If you begin to have those thoughts, the only way I have found to cope with them is... Yes.

Steven Bartlett (1:37)

There are clues in your early context that suggest you might have walked the path that you've walked in your life, but there's also clues that suggest you absolutely would never have done what you've done. Yeah. So taking me back to that early context.

John Ballen (1:50)

Yeah.

Steven Bartlett (1:50)

What do I need to know about that environment, the influences of that environment to understand how you ended up where you are today?

John Ballen (1:57)

I think it all starts with the family I was born into, were like very successful academic people. So I was born in a town called Quincy, Massachusetts. It's just south of Boston, Mass. And my mother, father and two sisters are like brilliant minds in like the academic sense of the word, just like brilliant. One of my sisters has gone on to win two Pulitzer Prizes. My dad's won a Pulitzer Prize.

This doesn't even flex, but to give you a sense of the people in my life. My other sister has a PhD and she worked out of a Harvard lab. My mom is a professional writer. And then there's me. When I was growing up, I could have done well in school, but I didn't want to. It was sort of like my form of rebellion was being a bad student willfully. And I would like go out and party with my friends and just was like trying to be sort of like a bad kid in a way. And also like the town I grew up in was sort of a, it was not a place where academics really thrived. It's like a really working class, like hard and tough place. I mean, Quincy's becoming much, much nicer, but it was a little bit of a tough place. And I sort of wanted to be like an edgy, like tough guy. And so I'd like get into street fights and get my ass kicked. And like, I'd like stay out drinking with my friends. But what it did is it set me up for like colossal failure by the time I got to college. I got into college because my mom, the professional writer, wrote my college essay and my grades were horrible in high school. In fact, so bad that when I sent off my application, the school got in touch with me and they were like, hey, your grades are not really what we're looking for. But boy, that essay was so beautiful. We're going to give you a chance. So I get into college. I go to the University of Massachusetts out in Western Mass. It's where a lot of kids where I was growing up. That's where they went to school. That's a big party school. And I just immediately bombed. First semester, like I got a 1.016 GPA, which should have been a zero. I basically didn't go to class.