The Dangers of Extreme Mindsets | Jocko Willink EP 469

0:28I am so grateful for you. community. All you have to do is go to lewishouse.com slash giveaway. And that's where you'll get all the details about how you can be a winner. And again, we're choosing winners every single day for 10 straight days. 10 days of greatness is my way of saying thank you for a decade of greatness. So what are you waiting for? Head to lewishouse.com slash giveaway and enter the giveaway right now. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

1:11How do you manage your own ego with the success you get? You know, you've had success in multiple areas of your career from a CEO to an author to a business leader to an executive coach, and leadership coach because I've seen over and over again through my own experiences, 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. You know, it's classic.

1:45Like 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, I've heard this before. I don't even 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.

2:17You'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. So it's a mindset every morning you wake up with an open mind. Yeah, and I don't want to get in this whole like morning routine where I go and look in the mirror and say be humble. No, I don't do that.

2:46Like I'm not, that's not me. But I'm just saying that the way I go about my business and my life is to say say to myself, okay Well, I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong about this You know, I mean even the book that I wrote follow on to extreme ownership The book is called the dichotomy of leadership 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? Obviously 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 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 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 and as that's extreme that's an extreme yes that's the problem with it and so the question is can you be too aggressive yes absolutely you can hey there's a machine gun nest over there let's attack it so you charge up the hill and everyone dies yeah you've 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?

4:17Yes, 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. Really? Yes, you can. But I thought you said you need to take ownership of everything. Two different things. Listen to this. If you're working for me and I say, okay, here's the mission that I want you to accomplish tonight. Here's the people I want you to take.

4:48Here'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? No. No, it's your plan. It's my plan. So when you go in the field and now you've come up against an obstacle and you're executing my plan, what's your attitude? 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.

5:20You didn't think of this option. Yeah, yeah. Right. So 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? And now if you're a good leader, you'll go get with your people and you'll say, oh, hey, guys, here's the plan. Or here's the mission that we have to accomplish. How do you guys 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? I need to adapt and adjust.

5:48What's your plan? You'll make it win. We came up with this. Yeah.

5:57Thank 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.

6:52Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.