Stop Letting Your Ego Get In Your Way | Jocko Willink EP 855

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12here's the thing there is one person in charge of how successful how fulfilled and how happy you'll be in 2023 and beyond and that person is you that's right i've got some good news though i want to help coach you into living your greatest year yet for free in my upcoming training and i'm to break down the keys to create long-lasting change over the next 12 months and beyond. And you can follow through on pursuing your dreams. You can rewrite the story in 2023 and stop living out the same fears and self-doubt that has held you back for years. And you can take a major leap towards multiple areas of your life.

0:48But first, you just got to make sure you click the link and show up. Join me for this upcoming free training, The Four Keys to Overcome Your Fears and Achieve your biggest goals by going to lewishouse.com slash reprogram. Make sure to click the link to sign up and I can't wait to see you there. If you want to open yourself up for a massive downfall, just let your ego get out of control. Really? If you want to let that happen, yeah, let your ego get out of control. So every single day for me, it starts at ground zero. I've got to go forward with an open mind, with a humble mind, looking at the world.

1:24You know, it's classic, Like when I get asked a question, I don't think to myself, oh, I know the answer to this. And I get asked questions all the time. And generally, when I hear a question, 99 % of the questions that I hear, I've heard in some form before. But I don't go, oh, I've heard this before. I already know the answer. I say, okay, well, let me hear this. What detail is this person talking about? What angle is this person coming at it from? What can I learn from this question? How can I assess this question? Everything that I look at, I try and look at from a humble perspective. And if you don't do that, it's going to be a problem.

1:56I mean, even when you're asking me questions about God, you're asking me questions about my beliefs. It's like, hey, here's my beliefs. I'm humble and I'm listening and my mind is open. And this is what I've seen and this is what I can tell you about it. I'm not sitting here jumping up and down saying you should believe this or you should believe that. I'm saying you should stay humble. You should keep an open mind about what's going on in the world. The dichotomy of leadership is like you can't be extreme in one direction or the other. If you're in a leadership position, you can't talk all the time, right?

2:28Obviously, as a boss, you need to communicate. You need to talk to your people. But if you talk too much, guess what happens? People stop listening to you. You're putting out too much information. They don't know what's important and what's not. So that's bad. You can't go too far in that direction. The other direction is you can't not talk enough. And now no one knows what's going on. No one knows what's happening. So you have to be balanced. And that's the whole idea of the dichotomy of leadership. but probably the first dichotomy in leadership that I had to say to myself you know what I'm I there's another side to this is I used to tell the young seal officers that you have to be aggressive you got to be default aggressive that's how you got to be because when something's going on you got to be aggressive to make that get that problem solved and if you're not being aggressive then you're hesitating well then you can get killed okay so there you go and that's what I used to tell guys can you be too aggressive absolutely hey there's a machine gun nest over there.

3:16Let's attack it. So you charge up the hill and everyone dies. You've been too aggressive. So what you have to do is you have to be balanced. So even as I had these kind of mantras, like default aggressive, can you do too much of that? Yes, you can. Can you be too passive? Absolutely. Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, now we're not making any progress. Now we're getting crushed by the enemy because we didn't maneuver. Okay. So that's bad. So where do you want to be? You want to be balanced. Even the idea of extreme ownership. Can you take too much ownership? Yes. Yes, you can. If you're working for me and I say, okay, here's the mission I want you to accomplish tonight.

3:50Here's the people I want you to take. Here's the weapons I want you to bring. Here's the vehicles I want you to bring. Here's the route I want you to use to get to the target. Here's the method I want you to use to secure the target. Here's the route I want you to do to get back. So that's the plan. Now you take ownership and go execute. Now, can you really take ownership of that plan? If someone else gave you the whole thing. I mean, I gave you the whole thing, right? Is that your plan? No. No. It's your plan. Yeah, it's my plan. So when you go in the field and now you come up against an obstacle and you're executing my plan, what's your attitude?

4:20Well, it's not my plan. It's his plan. And you're at an obstacle now and you're like, hey, Jocko didn't think of this. Right, right. So his plan's hard. So now you just back away and you come back and you say, hey, we failed the mission because you didn't think of this. You didn't think of this option. That's me taking too much ownership. So what I need to do is I say, hey, here's the mission. How do you want to do it? Now you all come up with a good plan. And you come back to me and you say, here's the plan. And I say, that looks pretty good. go execute. And now when you hit an obstacle in the field, what's your attitude?

4:46I need to adapt and adjust. What's your plan? You'll make it. We came up with this. Yes. So can you take too much ownership? The answer is yes, you can. You can name a trait, right? You can name a trait from a leadership perspective that you think is a positive trait. And you'll immediately see that if you go too far with it, it'll become bad. It'll become bad. So you have to be balanced. So even as I came up with the dichotomy of leadership, I had to be humble enough to say to myself, you know what? Being aggressive is really, really good most of the time, but if you're too aggressive, that's not good.

5:17If you're working for me and you're going to meet with a client and you have a bad pitch that you're going to give them and the client is some tiny client that I think is a low probability of us working with and the contract doesn't really matter. I'd be like, Hey, give it a shot. Here's a couple. I might give you a couple adjustments. And then you go and you do your thing and you come back and you're like, Oh no, we didn't land it. And I say, well, what do you think? Let's debrief. And now we talk about it. I said, you know, you said this and you said that. Here's some other ways to go about it.

5:45I might even actually have you do it to me. So then I could sit there and take some notes and say, hey, here's some other things that might've worked. Now, if you were going to meet with a big client that really was going to add value to our company, I'm going to either step in and be like, okay, let's think about that. What's their reaction going to be? And by the way, that's what I'm not going to say, no, don't do it that way. I'm going to say, tell me that again. And let me hear Let me give you some objections that you might hear from them. And all of a sudden, I'll let you come up with the solutions.

6:11Even though I'm sitting there going, yeah, what he needs to say is this. No, I'll let you come up with a solution. So then you're kind of going in there like you got this dialed. And then you're going to feel like you won, which you did.

6:25Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:21Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

7:36Thank you.