Special Forces Commander's Weird Trick For Overcoming Anxiety, "This Is The Reason People Quit", "Imposter Syndrome Is A Good Thing!"

Jocko Willink (0:00)

This is what I learned from 20 years of being in the Navy SEALs. Discipline, drive, how to make decisions under pressure, leadership strategy and tactics that you can apply to business and you can apply to your life as well. So let's go.

SPEAKER_2 (0:11)

Jocko Willink is a former Navy SEALs officer who uses his decades of military training to help people become masters of discipline and master their lives.

Jocko Willink (0:22)

Your excuses will destroy you. Your default mode should be to take ownership because if these problems are because of me, then I'm capable of fixing these problems.

Steven Bartlett (0:31)

So what's step one?

Jocko Willink (0:33)

First of all, small steps can be painful. Even something as simple as going to the gym. If you're completely out of shape, sometimes that can be enough to make you say, I'm not doing it anymore. You need to envision a path of where this can lead you to. Number two, most human instinct is to hesitate. But you see that problem over there, you got to go solve that problem. It's not going to go away. So if you're in the woods and you don't know where to go, start walking. And worst case scenario, you figure out that you walked the wrong direction. Okay, now you can go walk in the other direction. But standing there not doing anything is just waiting to starve to death. And the next challenge, detach from your emotions. Good leaders have control over our emotions. If I have to yell at you to get my point across, I've made like 47 other mistakes. My goal is I don't have to say a word, and you already know what to do.

Steven Bartlett (1:10)

Is there anything else that you'd add to that list?

Jocko Willink (1:12)

Absolutely. In fact, people don't really talk about this. And this could apply to just about anything. So if you're the type of person that doesn't f***, you're going to struggle.

Steven Bartlett (1:21)

Jocko, was there a hardest day while you were in the Navy SEALs?

Jocko Willink (1:25)

Yeah. That was the lowest point of my life.

Steven Bartlett (1:39)

Jocko, surprisingly, I couldn't find an awful lot in your childhood that would indicate to me how you became the man that you are today. And I say that because there's a bit of a stereotype that someone like you who becomes a Navy SEAL must have some kind of traumatic early event that shaped them to become some ultra resilient human being. When you look back on your childhood, what are the sort of dominoes that fell in that early chapter of your life that made you the man you are today?

Jocko Willink (2:11)

I wish I could positively identify the thing, the moment. The closest I've come is that I, a little kid, I was a little kid, I wanted to be some kind of soldier. I wanted to be some kind of commando. And so I collected little soldiers, little plastic soldiers. And one of the, I had different military units, like historical military units from around the world. And one of the historical military units that I had was the British commandos. And so I had these tiny figurines and they had machine guns and they had kayaks and they had little boats, little inflatable boats. And I thought to myself, that's what I want to do. I want to do that.

I wish I could do that. And then when I was probably around 12 or 13, I realized you actually could do that. You could actually get the job of being a commando. And then it was just a matter of figuring out which one of the American branches had the closest thing to what I thought was a British commando. And the closest thing that I found was being in the Navy and being in the SEAL teams.

Steven Bartlett (3:25)

And at 19 years old, you applied to be a Navy SEAL. OK, so I have to ask a very dumb question here, which is what is a Navy SEAL?

Jocko Willink (3:35)

So there's special operations, which I guess, you know, 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.