#942 - Gen. Stanley McChrystal - How To Actually Build Discipline

28:24He's like, I'm doing all of this work and I've got this stupid haircut and I've got it. He got through this selection. And for what? There's no shared sense of suffering or celebration. Whereas when you do it as a team and when you're part of a wider movement and when you're able to wear something on your chest that sort of says who you are and you know that that means more than just the words that there. And I wonder whether a lot of people who like the sound of the solo, prana, lone wolf, sigma male, I'm going to lift it and do it on my own. I don't need the help of anybody. No one's around me that's supporting me thing.

29:02And maybe that's true in the beginning, it probably is. And maybe you can use that sort of resentment and that chip on your shoulder and this sense of being ostracized or left behind is real good fuel. But I get the sense that if you hold onto that fuel for too long, it becomes inefficient and even longer than that. It becomes toxic. And that's certainly something I've noticed. I noticed it with training, with going to the gym, you know, for a decade and a half, I was able to go into the gym and bury myself. And it didn't really matter. I didn't care. And then the last three years are so I just I really I just want to train with my friends or with my trainer who is also friend and I just want to I can push myself really hard but doing it on my own is feel like I've emptied that tank a little bit and it was good and it got me to a really good place and I'm proud of that version of me for doing it but I've kind of I think evolved beyond that or that's just not the same sort of fuel that I can use anymore and the same thing again sort of speaking for myself for a long time ran this thing, this project just me and a video editor with a mullet and a Facebook messenger chat and we're in different cities and then we're in different countries.

30:16And now I'm thinking, huh, like I can still do it, but I'd rather do it with a team. I'd rather do it with a squad of people that got my back and we can high five when things go well and we can support each other when things go poorly. And yeah, I wonder whether the Sort of Pedestalization of the lone wolf person going and doing it on their own is maybe encouraging People to stay in that mode for too long and what just how important the the camaraderie in the the sense of team ship is Yeah, without being tried it is the journey and after destination when I left the service after 34 years a Friend of mine and I co -founded a company and my motivation was just to create a team that I could be a part of I didn't care whether we made money.

31:07I really didn't care what business we went into. But I wanted a place to go. I wanted a jersey to wear. I wanted comrades because I realized that that was most important to me. That still is. And I'm pretty self -aware about that right now. And so I think when people don't understand that and they think the goal is to be X, really the goal is life between here and there. Yeah, that's a lovely way to put it. I mean, I gold medalist syndrome, the, you know, the, sure, would it be bad or would it be painful if you worked really hard and didn't achieve the thing that you wanted to achieve? But don't pretend like working really hard and achieving the thing that you want to achieve is bliss either because when you get to that point, you have to ask yourself, what the fuck do I do now?

31:54Like, that's a difficult question also. And it's even with that, there's an additional level of pain because you're in a position that no one is going to give you sympathy for. It's a champagne problem. Oh, you reached your goals. How unfortunate for you. You became into general and you were 43 to 34 years and all the rest of it. You go, yeah, I know, I get it. But it's still an existential crisis. It's still a question of, what do I do now? Who is my character? Who am I after this? It also touches upon, we've got an attitude by some people today that says, if you were obsessed, if you were a card, you're a sucker.

32:29You know, you are going out there and you are ruining the rest of your life. You're not getting work -life balance and all that sort of thing. And I'm just not of that view. My view is there is a certain, there's a certain purity and there's a certain satisfaction that comes with obsession. And it doesn't have to mean you're jerk in the rest of your life. You don't have a good relationship. But it means those things you want, you're willing to try really hard for. You're willing to work really hard for. You're willing to see how good I can be at that. Because if you go 70%, you always go wonder, well, if I'd only done X, I had a lot of people in the army used to come to me and they'd go, you know, I thought about going in the rangers, I was gunna, but I was doing X and I had laundry in and I'd want, you know, I'd go, you got to make the choice to do those things sometimes because if you don't test yourself, one, you'll never know.

33:25Now, how do you come to think about character? Why is it so important? Well, it's everything. It's the essence of who we are. At the end of the day, character, and I brought it down to a mathematical equation. It's what are our convictions, the things we believe in that we've really pressure tested, and then the discipline we have to live up to it. And so I think life is a journey for character towards character because you are trying to find out exactly what you believe and you are trying to develop the discipline to live to that. If you think of the Stoics, think of Marcus Aurelius and you do things a certain way to a certain standard simply because that's the right thing to do.

34:08And I think when you can make character in its purest sense, that's sort of what it is. And I think character is individually based, but it's also society. Society has a shared character, sort of the sum of all of our parts. And if we can't make those parts fit together effectively, then it doesn't work. This episode is brought to you by Jim Shark. Jim Shark makes the best Jimware on the planet. The hybrid shorts in Onyx Gray and Navy are a complete game changer that the best men's training shorts in the world. They've got a crest hoodie, which is what I'm flying in anytime I'm traveling in there.

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35:29Is it something that you develop? I think you develop it. There's certainly an argument that the level of stubbornness may come from birth, the level of parts of discipline. But I know most of the things that I do, I do because I learn to do them. Somebody, I still fold my underwear in my drawers. Everybody laughs at it, but I do. And when you say everybody laughs at it, how many people are seeing you're underwear in your drawers? That's a great question. and hopefully not many, but those who hear about it just sort of shake their heads. But I also get up and work out. I also eat one meal a day.

36:11And I also do some other things that I think very directly make my life better than it would be. And so they can laugh at my fixation on doing certain things to whatever standard I've said. But the reality is for the most part That has served me well.

36:35What? I wonder whether there's a sense that leaders sort of struggled to balance character a lot of the times as we've mentioned stubbornness as maybe one of the traits. A lot of the times leaders become leaders because they have personal ambition. right, that they want to be the person that leads the charge. Now they can want to do it because there is this sense of giving back of service to everybody else. But let's not pretend like there's not a sense of kind of shallow need for recognition that goes into that. Like what drives somebody to be the absolute best, rarely would it be always just unmolested desire to serve and hand out to other people.

37:28So I'm interested in how people who want to become leaders, people who want to drive forward can balance personal ambition with this sense of service and this sort of greater good and this giving because it seems to me like there's a tension between these two things? I think there can be, but it can also be synergistic. And what by that, I think the most effective leaders I've seen are very ambitious. They are ambitious because they want to take on greater responsibilities, they want to be recognized, they want to prove to others and themselves that they can do things really well. And I think it's just a human trait that's not ambition can be is I want to be a person that I admire, which means I'm going to live to certain values.

38:22And many of those won't be listed by the people who watch me, but I'll know. I'll know how I treat people. I'll know the things I do. I'll know why I do certain things. And so if those two are complimentary, if you have this tremendous pressure on yourself from yourself, and you have an ambition to try to do better, what I see is people can be not only very successful, they can be very character driven leaders and they draw certain lines they won't cross. Now we all know cases where the second part, the personal lines are more flexible and when they run into the opportunity to do to get ahead or be advantaged, they're willing to push those personal standards that they know they are violating they're willing to push those aside.

39:18That's when we drift into something that is less than character or bad character but we see it way too often and we don't call people on it enough. You've got this line leaders must do what that people need not what they need just dig into that a little bit for me. Yeah if you think about a leader often a leader needs to stand up in front of everybody and be cheered by the troops or followed by the organization or bark and everybody's scurries around their deaths. Whatever it is, the leader needs to feel powerful or feel successful. And in some cases that is performance for money or for other things.

39:59And it can quickly become about the leader and you start to view this organization as the supporting cast to your greatness. But But the reality is the leader doesn't do that much. They may be very busy, but in most organizations, the leaders aren't closest to the enemy, aren't closest to the customer, aren't closest to the client. And so what the leader really should be is a great enabler, the person who is doing everything they can to set those other people up to be effective. Now that doesn't mean you're down there rubbing their bellies all the time and giving them skittles and beer, it means that you are maybe very demanding, but you're also thinking, what do they need?

40:45Not just materially, but what do they need to want to do? What it is you need them to do? How do you create shared incentives so that they want to be a part of what the leaders do? So one of my favorite books is Endurance by Alfred Lansing about Shackletons crossing of the Antarctic at spoiler alert for anyone that hasn't read it. He doesn't do it. In that, one of the things that I really loved is a lot of the guys had diaries and a lot of the guys were writing in the diaries. And what you get to hear is what happened and what everybody else heard from Shackleton, but then you get to see what he wrote in his diary.

41:30And it's the first time that I saw the sort of Bruce Wayne and Batman duality of a leader in a time of real crisis, Mortal Parallel, and in his diary, Shackleton is writing about his sort of chronic uncertainties, just swimming in self -doubt and fear, and he has no idea what he's doing. And then you hear from all of the other men in their diaries about what they hear from Shackleton when he steps out onto the field of play, so to speak. And he's just commanding and he's got it together and he's got a plan. He knows where we're going and how it's gonna work and we're gonna eat the dogs and we're gonna kill the polar bears.

42:13You know, they've got everything put together. And I really looked at that as quite a formative example. of the price that only leaders pay, there is this silent, self -doubt that you can't let leak out and it is a cost. So are you going to be in charge of this thing? You want to run a business. You want to be the captain of a team. You want to build a family. Okay. Well, that's great. But there are going to be certain things that you basically can't share with anybody in your organization and you need to swallow that yourself and you're going to have to deal with it and then you're going to have to go back out there having had those doubts, get rid of them and then convince people to go forward even though they will have the exact doubts that you've just had to overcome yourself.

43:05And yeah, I just, I really loved that book and I loved seeing a raw expose of what it's like to not be certain, but to kind of show up and do the job in any case. Yeah, it, uh, that's an amazing story. If I remember, he lost nobody. Correct. Which is impossible in the. I, I very much focus on Admo James Stockdale's experience in the Hanoi Hilton for seven years. He was a little older than other prisoners. And can you tell, can you tell Stockdale's story for the people that don't? He was a Navy aviator who was shot down in 1965. And he is a little bit older, so we had a little more education, a little more philosophy and faith.

43:51And so in captivity, what he found was this case where you have no control over your environment. You are not only being poorly treated, you're being tortured. And when you are tortured, you break. And when you break, you lose self -esteem. You are forced to make statements. Things which you swore you would never do. In fact, you gave an oath to the United States government that said, if captured, I'll give my name where I can serial number. And that's just not practical. Under torture, you give more. So the people who are in this situation were in this hellish long -term captivity. And what stocktail developed was something that came to be known as the Stocktail Paradox.

44:36And that is you need to recognize the absolute reality of your situation, the fact that you can't control certain things. It is what it is and you can't deny that. But at the same time in parallel, you have to hold a belief in the long term positive outcome that you need. When I think of Shackleton, I think in his mind, he absolutely knows how bad things are. But he is communicating to the people who are there with him is that the endurance is locked in the ice. He communicates to them. We're going to make it. And because of his nature, they want to believe him. And because he sticks with it and is willing to endure difficult things with him, it increases his credibility with him.

45:24But I think that's true of leaders in business or in education or anything. People want to believe that you're not going to quit, that you are basically optimistic, and that you will be there for them when they waver. What role do you think moral courage plays here? I think it's huge because we think of physical courage, but moral courage is much harder in my view. Physical courage happens in a moment you react. and typically in a moment, moral courage typically goes over a period of time and in most cases, you're in a position where you've got a great reason to do other than what you sort of think you ought to do, whether you are going to lose your job or you're going to or go through great embarrassment, any number of things that come.

46:15And so you've got this tremendous desire to not want to step up in that moment. And someone who's got real moral courage inspires everyone else. When someone stands up to the bully, when someone accepts responsibility that they probably could have sidestepped, when somebody is honest when they didn't have to be, nobody's gonna catch them. I think that But that, it not only reinforces in the individual, but it's incredibly inspiring. In the quick story, in the first Gulf War, I watched my commander then major general Wayne Downing, and I was in a special operations task force sending commandos deep into western Iraq to go find Iraqi scud missiles.

47:09And so these little teams were sent out there, and it was high risk, and one of our teams got in contact with the Iraqis, got a couple guys wounded, but they were able to break contact. So they called back and they said, we want to be extracted. And General Downing knew that if he extracted that team, we wouldn't get permission from General Schwartzkopf, the four -star commander, to go back in again. He knew that the effect on our mission would be essentially to shut it down. And so he said, no. And everybody was shocked because if that organization had then been attacked again by the Iraqis, policed up and killed, Wayne Downing's name and American special operations would have had a position of ignomity, ignomity forever.

47:59He would have been blamed completely. And I don't think most of them understood that what he was really doing is looking out for the organization in the long term. It was even harder because he wasn't on the ground with that team. He was a combat veteran of Vietnam and he'd proven his courage. But when you're not on the ground and yet you force someone else to accept danger, it's more morally frightening because if you're there with him and go, hey, we're all in this together. If you're not, you're out there and of course you're open to criticism. So I was amazed in the moment because I was one of his op -softsters and I was able to watch it up close And that was a moment of the loneliness of command.

48:46No, nobody else wanted to understand. I don't even think after the fact most people gave them credit for that, but it never left me The difficulty of that decision. Yeah, the loneliness of command is a lovely way to put it. Something else that you spend a good bit of time talking about is conviction. What do you come to think about the role of conviction? Yeah, I think I define convictions as things which you believe, not those superficial things you believe. Someone tells you, you know, X and you just accept it because they told you and you don't bother looking up and you don't care. Convictions aren't that.

49:24Convictions are those things about life, about values, that you have decided to examine and to think about and really wrap your mind around. Unfortunately, I think we don't do enough conviction now. Even in many cases, our religion is, the religion our parents took us to when we were young. So we just accepted. And so most people are the religion that they are first exposed to. They didn't do a comparative analysis and pick the best one. most people are patriotic to their nation because that's where there are citizens. Most people listen to what pundits or social media influencers or whatever and they sort of grab these beliefs and they pass them off even to themselves as their own and they start to believe this is this just because it is but when you really get a chance to reflect on something and force yourself to put some opposition, red team your own ideas and beliefs, decide why you believe that, because convictions are things you should live for, or if necessarily be willing to die for.

50:36And that's the bedrock that a real character's built on, solid convictions that you are as sure about as you can be. What did you learn from Edison? He seems to be a guy that had quite a bit of conviction. Thomas Edison. Yeah. Yeah, I mean strange guy. Very ambitious guy, obsessed worker.

51:06When I think of him in convictions, I think he was almost single -threaded on ambition. Now, an ambition that was impressive to create. But I don't think of him as one of the moral leaders that I would use as a guidepost. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because, frankly, I'm dependent on it. For the last three years, I've started my morning every single day the same way with element in a coal glass of water. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. Each grab and go The stick pack contains a science -backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium with no coloring, no sugar, no artificial ingredients or any other junk.

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52:24Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom. Yeah, I mean, look. And this comes back to that stubbornness thing because conviction kind of has, well, it's got many meanings, but one of them being, you could say, an unwavering commitment to the mission, right, could be one way to put it in. And you're right. Maybe Edison, if you're going to use him as your philosophical guidepost might not be optimal, but if you were to think about the stubbornness and the resilience piece, how many different attempts did he have at the light bulb?

53:16It's thousands and thousands of experiments trying to do this thing. I'm pretty sure his factory burned down at one point and him and his son were stood next to it looking at it. And Edison just had this psychotic belief, this unwavering stubbornness. And it wouldn't do to have an entire organization or country of Edison's, but it's probably pretty important to have them. It's important to have Tom Brady's, right? It's important to have them too. But yeah, it's interesting how different people with weaknesses and strengths can end up in sort of magnificent places. I think if we didn't have people with obsession, we'd be a much poorer society, not just materially, but emotionally, because almost anyone that I know of that really created something special or did something hard, changed things was obsessed.

54:13Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I mean, that was his life until he was murdered. There were just a whole bunch of cases and we sort of criticize them now. We say, well, they were too obsessed. They didn't spend enough time with their kids and their dog. I get it, but we have an electric lifeboat, you know. Well, look, the price that people pay to be successful is, it's an interesting tension. It's an interesting question I always like to ask because in some ways it's worth it, because what social creatures we need validation, we want to conquer things, we want to achieve We want to finish our lives feeling like we're validated.

54:59But on the flip side, lots of people get toward the end of their life and realize that not only did they manage to climb up a ladder that they didn't mean to, but the one that, if they were given the choice, they end up in a place they didn't mean to get to and one that they don't like as well. And you go, the goal is to make sure that whatever it is that you're trying to achieve, whatever your conviction is applied to, is something that you're not going to look back on with regret. And that requires actually a degree of a lack of stubbornness. It requires a little bit of mindfulness. It requires some perspective.

55:41It means that you need to drop some of the intensity. And you know, you look at any normal bell curve of traits. And although most people would say muscularity, for instance, you say to most guys, how muscular do you want to be? More, more. The answer is there is no amount of muscularity that's too much. But if you get up to the 99 .99 percentile, you're talking about dying early because M. Tawzon and you're carrying a lot of weight around and stress on your organs and high blood pressure and drugs and all this sort of stuff. My point being, and the same for being undermuscled, right? There are some girls that would just like, how thin do you want to be?

56:20Thinner. Thinner would be like fit into a small address size, et cetera. When you get toward the absolute extreme of any trait, you end up in a situation where the outcomes you get are pretty unpredictable and you end up paying weird prices. How committed do you want to be to the cause? More, more, I want to be more committed. So, well, if you end up being too committed to the cause, you can never have any perspective because you never question yourself. You never actually step back and go, is this what I should be doing in my time? Is this the best way that I should be spending my time? So, yes, this is why we have a range of characters within a team, right?

56:58We don't just have one person that's copied and pasted multiple times because you would end up with an entire team of the same strengths and the same weaknesses. And the point of a team is to have lots of people with different strengths and different weaknesses. And it's also why you have relationships with people, with partners, spouses, different people because in most of us, they round us out. They pull us a little bit in other directions. You know, because if we didn't have those, we would, some people would live, monk life existence, monk life existences, focused on one thing, whatever it is.

57:33and I think other people can help you round that out just a bit. Where does humility come into play here? Yeah. I think humility is hugely important and it needs to be real. People can act humble but be absolutely arrogant inside and it's sort of an act. I think you've got to be humble enough to know who you are, the opportunities, maybe the advantages that you are enjoying, all of the things that mean that you are not maybe as special as you might want to believe you are, and your limitations. Now, it shouldn't stop you from trying to do things. You know, just because I am humble enough to believe I'm not the best person at X doesn't mean I shouldn't try to compete.

58:29But you need to be realistic. With people, with other people, I think humility is key because it's respect. If you have humility, you are respecting that they bring something to the table. They might be, they might bring more to it than you do. And so in an organization having humility is respect for the organization. It's admitting that you are not putting yourself on a pedestal and saying that you are, you know, the superperson and that they should bow down. You're basically saying, I'm one of you. I happen to be in this position and I will do what this position requires, but realize that it is.

59:08It's two degrees role playing and they know it. And that's okay. I think this is why I'm not taking us off too seriously, can help too. There are times to be serious, but yeah, if you can be a little bit playful with it, I think seriousness is great. And I really do applaud seriousness, seriousness about emotions, seriousness in your pursuits in trying to be the best and trying to get things done. But seriousness is also when taken to the extreme, again the 90 % of the thing, it's a kind of brittleness as well because it doesn't allow you to insulate yourself from little challenges and insults and damage that end up coming in.

59:55And it also makes you seem way less approachable. So yeah, humility with a good dose of humor I think is a nice way to offset that drive, you know, that sort of psychopathic forward motion, that unrelenting desire for more. Absolutely. Yeah. General Stanley McChrystal, ladies and gentlemen, it's been five years, maybe more, maybe five or six years since we last spoke. And as we said before, we've both gotten younger, which is great. So I really appreciate you. I love your insights. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything that you're doing? Well, McChrystalgroup .com is the organization that I'm the leader of and a part of.

1:00:34and honor to be that. It's that team that we talked about. That came. Sonny, I appreciate you. Thank you. You're kind.