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

25:00So I need to give you enough exposure that you do well, increase your confidence and you're going to do fun. Whenever we're swimming, I don't know, a couple of the enemies just outside of our depth in any regard. We have that thing that some people have dubbed imposter syndrome. But we start the story. We tell ourselves about this depth is that we're a fraud. We shouldn't be out this far. We're going to get found out. And that can sometimes I think if we tell ourselves that story about whatever, you know, depth we're swimming at that low as our performance. Sometimes it can make us our confidence decrease.

25:37What is your take on this time imposter syndrome? Do you think it's a real thing? Yeah, I think it's a real thing. I don't think it's bad. I don't think it's bad because if once again, if you're coming to work for me and you're like, I'm glad you hired me. I'm ready to take over this department. Look out. I'd be a little bit questioning the fact that you are so overconfident that you're going to go in and do things that you might not really understand. Now, if you had a little imposter syndrome and you said, Hey, Jocke, I really appreciate you hired me. I haven't really done this type of work before.

26:11Can I ask you a couple questions? I'd be thinking myself, okay, he's humble. He's wanting to do a good job. He doesn't think he knows everything. I'd feel more comfortable with someone like that. So I don't think imposter syndrome is a bad thing. I think if you feel it, it's actually a good indication that you're humble and you have an open mind and you're going to listen to what people have to say. So that's number one. And number two, if you feel like you have imposter syndrome, if you're going to a meeting and you're going to get assigned a project or you're going to be discussing a project that you're really, wait, should I even be here?

26:47Should I be putting charge of this project? What you do is you go into the meeting and you say, Hey, everyone, I really appreciate everyone coming to the kickoff of this meeting. Hey, just so everyone knows this is my first time running a project like this. I'm definitely going to have some questions for some of you that done this before. So if you see me going off track on something and you see a mistake that I'm making, please let me know because what I want is for the team to win. Okay, there it is. It's on the table. I don't know everything. I've not that experience in this particular thing, but I'm humble and willing to listen and I want the team to do well.

27:20No more imposter syndrome. Is that the same in the Navy sales because when we assume that you, you know, as a leader, you've got to tell people what to do. That is wrong in the Navy sales and that is not a good assumption in the seal teams. You the good leaders in the seal teams absolutely have an open mind. Want to hear other people's opinions on how to execute an operation. Want to hear what shortfalls there are when a plan is presented that, Hey, what about this and what about that? And a good leader is not going to impose plan. As in fact, my standard operating procedure was to have my subordinate leadership come up with plans instead of me trying to come up with the plans.

28:02In fact, that's the best way to operate. That means you ask them for the plan. 100%. Why? There's a multitude of reasons. Number one, I want you to have an ownership of the plan. Right? So if I'm imposing a plan on you, then that's not really your plan. I want you to, I want you to come up with the plan. And I want you to go to your team and I want you to collectively come up with a plan that you all embrace and understand and buy into. So it's going to be a better plan from your perspective if you come up with it. Also, if I come up with a plan, I'm in the plan. So when I'm in the plan, I can't see the plan as well.

28:42I want to be outside the plan, looking at it from the outside from a different perspective where then I can see the holes in the plan and I can ask you some questions about the plan that you came up with. And finally, if I'm coming up with the plan, if I'm staring down at the map coming up with the plan, well, who's looking up and out? Who's looking at the follow on operations? Who's looking at where are our other units are out in the battlefield? Who's checking on the intelligence that we're gathering about the enemy? If I'm looking down and in, I'm not looking up and out. If I'm coming up with a plan myself, I'm looking down and in.

29:16If I'm letting you come up with a plan, I can look up and out, you can look down and in and we can have a lot more awareness of the battlefield. Often leaders and managers, we get, I think, caught up in the proverbial trenches. We get a little bit too close to the paintings. We can't see the picture. How important do you think it is to be the leader that's able to take a step back? That is the job of a leader. That is the job of a leader to take a step back, detach from the situation and see the entire picture of what is unfolding or what is being planned or what is happening. If you are in the problem, you won't see the solution to the problem.

30:06We will vary rarely. So you have to be able to detach. That's one of the main things that I tried to teach young leaders when I was in the SEAL team. It's the same thing that I try and teach. Leaders now is to take a step back, detach from the chaos, detach from the mayhem, detach from your emotions, detach from your ego and be able to assess the best way to execute. And give the book is called Extreme Ownership that you referenced. That doesn't mean that I do everything myself. In fact, what I want to do is I want you to take ownership and how do I get you to take ownership? I give it to you.

30:41Hey, Steven, how do you want to run this project? And listen, what if you come up with a terrible plan? Let's say you come up with a... Let's say I come up with like, in my mind, I've got something that's going to be a 95 % solution. And I say, well, you know, I'm going to delegate to Steven, how do you want to do this? And you come up with like an 80 % solution. Now what should I do? I'll tell you. I'll still run with your plan. I'll be like, okay, Steven sounds good. If you come to me with a 70 % plan, I might say, hey, Steven, what about this? And you go, yeah, I'm going to make adjustment there and all of a sudden we got it to a 78 % plan and we're still good.

31:25If you come to me with a 20 % plan, now I can ask you three or four questions before you say, hey, Jockele, I'll be back in a couple hours. I'm going to go reformulate this thing. And by the way, that's training you, right? All those questions are training you. You coming up with a plan is training for you because if if I've got people that work for me and they can't come up with a plan by themselves, I'm complete failure as a leader. So I'm going to train you so that you can come up with plans and I can look up and out.

31:53Takes a load of patience, doesn't it? Because you know, you know, in those many of those situations that you're not going to get from A to B as fast as you possibly could have. It's an investment in a long term efficiency because even though I might have to invest a little bit more time right now and I spent 10 minutes explaining to you why this tactic would be better than that tactic, even though it's going to cost me 10 minutes right now, or maybe a half an hour, we look up in six months and you're actually coming up with better plans with me. You know, I read throughout your books, you went from being that young teenager who passed training to really like leading the Navy sales in many respects.

32:32Well, leading an element of sales. That's when you look back on that accomplishment, have you figured out what it is about you in particular that allowed you enable you to do that? Is that something, is that, is there a muscle you agree?

32:56I was, I'm a hard worker. I, you know, I was never great at anything like as a kid. I wasn't the fastest, I wasn't the strongest, I wasn't the smartest. But I did, I did know that I could work hard. I had to work hard and I listened to people. I didn't think I knew everything. Even sometimes I'll joke about yeah, you know, when you're young and arrogant, even when I was young and arrogant, like we all are when we're 23 years old or 22 years old and you're young, you think you know everything. Even then I always had that little like you don't know everything. And I think that humility played a big role in me being able to be successful because I was never afraid to say, hey, I'm not 100 % sure what to do right now.

33:50What do you guys think? Or hey, I feel like I've reached the limitations of my thought process. I need some help. And so I think that's one of the main reasons that I was able to do a good job, to do a good job. When I meet someone like you, I wonder, I go, this guy must have seen so many things, so many things that the average human being will absolutely never see. You know, and I, because you were, you were sent all around the world on some absolutely incredible, unimaginable missions for 20, 20 years. For the average person who has no idea what your eyes have seen, can you pay me a picture of some of those extremes?

34:40Oh, it's war.

34:45So it's war. It's people being wounded, people being killed. And I rack with the insurgents that we were fighting. It's them torturing people, mutilating their bodies, raping, beheading people, horror.

35:19But you know, it's interesting when I talk to other people, when I meet people, I always think to myself, what you're saying that you think when you see me, I always think that when I see other people, because other people, we don't know what they've been through. You don't know what kind of childhood they had. You don't know what kind of horrors they've seen. You don't want to kind of abuse they've suffered. You don't want to kind of, you don't know what kind of trials and tribulations other people have faced. So I don't, I look at everyone. And, and also the trials and tribulation that someone faces, someone faces.

36:04That's profoundly difficult for them, regardless of what it was. Regardless of if they were a person that got injured really bad, when they were in high school, they're 15 years old, and they broke their leg, and they couldn't play their sport anymore. Now they're 17, but that was a traumatic thing for them. And, yes, when I look at other people, when I talk to other people, I always think everyone, everyone, every human faces challenges. And you don't know what they've been through, and they might have been through things that are worse than what I've been through. And I usually, my assumption is, people have been through a lot of challenges, and they, they persevered through it.

36:52And here they are. So I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

36:59But humans aren't supposed to be exposed to those kinds of images. And I think if you spoke to a, I know, trauma psychologist, they would, they would class a lot of those things that you've seen as what they call, like, taught tea traumas, like really, really traumatic events. How, how does someone like you go about processing those things to ensure that that trauma doesn't show up in later life? You know, we talk about soldiers coming back from war suffering with PTSD and things like that. What if you don't sort of insulate yourself or at least help you understand the some of the things you saw.

37:32There's evil in the world. And there's evil people in the world. Then evil people are going to do heinous and atrocious things. And that's a reality. And that's always been the reality.

37:51And the best thing that I can do is, well, when I was in the military, do my best to stop that kind of atrocious behavior. And when I'm out of the military, try not to try and help people move away from those thoughts. I mean, when you're talking about like your, my, my family, like my family didn't, my wife wasn't tracking what was going on when I was overseas. She didn't know what was happening most of the time. You know, when my guys got wounded or my guys got killed, she knew she went to their, she went to the hospital to visit them. She went to their funerals. But I wasn't dragging her down the, the, the, to the depths of human nature.

38:49I took that and same with my kids. I didn't share with them that these things happen. So, and then that's, so, so I think from my perspective, you know, it's like the reality of the world is the other is evil people in the world. I accept that reality. I understand that reality. There's also good people in the world. And there's people that do amazing things. There's people that sacrifice their lives for their friends. And that's part of humanity. So, I like to focus on that part of humanity rather than the dark side of humanity. But if you really want to appreciate the light and the good, then you have to recognize that there's darkness and there's evil.

39:45Was there a hardest day while you were in the Navy SEALS? Is there a day you look back on and say that was the most sort of emotionally testing day? Yeah, losing guys from combat.

40:02And that stays with you. Oh, yeah. Always.

40:11I just can't imagine. You know, I just can't. I've never lost a friend. I've got two older brothers. I've never lost my brothers. I just can't imagine. I can't imagine how difficult it is to like go forward when you've lost, you know, you refer to these people as your brothers.

40:40And I'm not unique.

40:45And the guys we were over in the Battle of the Mottie, when we were over there, the Army and the Marine Corps. They were losing guys every day. This is not unique. I'm not unique. There's guys that were in charge of units that lost 10, 12, 15 guys.

41:04And it's not unique for human beings either because even though you haven't lost any friends, you haven't lost any of your brothers, you will. This is part of life. And so this is part of life. People have, you know, everyone's died. And in combat, people have died. And people carried on. And I know that my friends that died, they would not want me to sit around and mourn and break down and drink and pop pills. They wouldn't want me to do that at all. They want me to live. That's what they would want. They would want me to live. They would want me to go out and make things happen. And drive on and enjoy and surf and play guitar and do your jitsu.

42:02That's what they'd want me to do. 100%. 100%. In fact, they would be disgusted if what I did with the gift that they gave me was piss it away. They'd be disgusted. And I won't do that. Not a chance. I'm going to live like they would want me to.

42:30In those moments, that's certainly what logic tells you. But those moments, it's hard to be logical in those moments. Right? Yeah.

42:45I ended up with some pattern recognition on this whole scenario. Unfortunately, because when you lose friends over and over and over again, you start to see what happens from an emotional perspective, from a physical perspective. And what I began to recognize as a pattern is in the way that I explain this to people that go through loss like this is you're going to have you're not going to be in control of your emotions sometimes. So, and since you're 31 years old, you've had control pretty good control over your emotions since you were seven years old or eight years old. Occasionally you'd break down occasionally lose your temper, but you've gotten more and more in control the older you've gotten.

43:46So, you're not used to not being in control of your emotions. We as adults are not used to losing control of our emotions. So, what's going to happen? You lose one of your friends, you lose one of your family members, you're going to get hit with a wave, waves of emotion that you can't control. And this sometimes causes people to to really overreact and think that they're in this terrible place because they think, oh my gosh, I've been able to control my emotions for the last 30 years. And now I'm lose now I can't control my emotions. There's something wrong with me is what they think. And this is what I learned is that those waves of emotion, they're going to roll back.

44:35And you're going to get control again and take a breath and then you're going to get hit with another storm, but it's going to go away. And you're going to get hit with another storm, but it's not going to be as strong. And then it's going to go away and you're going to get hit with another storm, but it's going to be a longer period of time and it's not going to be as strong. And what this is is this is your, this is you processing what happened. And eventually you do get you regain control of your emotions and they're still going to be times. There's still going to be times where you're going to be three years, five years, ten years down the road, you're going to hit with a wave of emotion and you're going to be caught off guard.

45:21It's going to catch you. I had a guy in my podcast that was in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. And so we talked about World War II where he was a young, private soldier and then he was a little bit more senior when he was in Korea. And then in Vietnam he was a battalion commander. So he's in charge of 700 guys. And we were talking and I said something along the lines of, I asked him something about the casualties that he took in his battalion. And so now this is, you know, he was in Vietnam in, I don't know, 1967 or 1968. So it's been 60 years. And I asked him about casualties that he took and he got choked up.

46:13Got choked up, lost control of his emotions for a second. And when I saw that, I felt so relieved. I felt so relieved because I thought, oh, it's always going to be like this. And that's okay. It's okay. It's okay. It's normal. Lost your friends. Lost your brothers. Is it wrong that you get choked up when you talk about nothing wrong with that? Here's a guy that lost his, lost, lost some of his men 60 years ago and he's getting choked up right now. Why? Because he loved them. Because he wishes he could have brought them through that conflict and he didn't. And he feels it. And he lived a normal life retired from the army, got follow on jobs and had another career.

47:08But he lost his friends, his brothers, his men and that hurts. And it's not going to go away. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with you. Nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with me. Do I get choked up sometimes? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Lost some of my best friends. Does that hurt? Yep. Do I wallow in that? No. Do I dwell in those emotions? Nope. I don't. And they wouldn't want me to. And they'd be disinpoided if I did.

47:48I think it's really important because as men we don't, we get conflicting messages about emotion. And how to express it and what that looks like. And if there's weakness to certain emotions or if, you know, but the psychology seems to be pretty clear that the suppression of these emotions, they're trying to hide them, the total compartmentalizing of them doesn't actually make them go away. They just appear somewhere else in a bottle or in some kind of recreational drug or somewhere else. And nor does suppressing them isn't going to help. And nor is letting them run your life. So because you're sad, now you're going to make a bunch of bad decisions because you're sad.

48:29No, no, it doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that. You're sad. Okay. You get emotional sometimes. Okay. Got it. Now get control of your emotions and carry on with your life. And sometimes you're going to get hit with those waves and that's okay. I think that's a big misconception and sort of relates to what you're saying. Oh, I'm having an emotional moment right now. There's something wrong with me. No, there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you. The other extreme is, oh, I'm letting my emotions run my life and I'm making a bunch of bad decisions. And my excuse is, well, you know, I lost from friends or I had this traumatic experience happen to me.

49:11That's why I'm doing, that's just an excuse. And it's a very easy excuse. And in society, the last thing I want to say to you is, well, you can't act like that. Oh, you lost one of your friends? Hey, that doesn't mean you can make excuses. You can't use that excuse. No, I go, hey, man, okay. That's what I say, right? I'm a polite person. I'm an empathetic person. You're sad. You're making bad decisions. You're saying it's because you lost your friend or you went through this traumatic thing and I go, okay, how can I help instead of saying, hey, man, yeah. Guess what? It's time to carry on. Don't dwell on the, I've told a thousand veterans this.

49:56Remember, don't dwell. Remember, remember your friends, don't dwell in the past though. Remember, don't dwell. That's what we have to do. And the emotions, yes. Embrace those emotions. But don't let those emotions embrace you. Don't let those emotions run your life. There is, there is a, because people say, suppressing your emotions is bad. Okay, so I'm just going to let all these emotions out and they're going to run my life now. No, no. No, at a certain point you say, okay, my emotions are now leading me down the wrong path. I'm in control. I'm not going to allow my emotions to make my decisions.

50:40They're in the calculus. I'm not saying take your emotions out of the calculus, but they have to be one component of your calculus. Not the whole equation. The equation has to include emotions, yes, logic, yes, future, yes, goals, yes, family, yes, work, yes, finances, yes, all those things have to be in the calculus. Emotions has to be a part of that calculus. You can't pull them out of there, or they'll bite you. But you can't make them the overwhelming denominator of everything that you do. Or it's going to be problematic. I heard you tell a story which I thought was really inspiring. Actually, I was just listening to it before you came about a friend of yours who was going through hardship in that life.

51:26And your advice for them was to start walking. Yeah. Yeah, it was a guy who was going through hardship with his job, with his marriage. And the marriage was coming to an end. The job was not, was going to come to an end as well. And he's out there and doesn't know what to do. And the analogy that I set up for him is if I'm in the woods, which is where you are right now, you're in the woods, and you don't know where to go. Because the wife's not there anymore, the job's not there anymore. You don't know where to go right now. So if you're in the woods and you don't know where to go, start walking.

52:11You've got to start walking because the perspective is not going to change. You have to start moving forward. You have to start taking steps in order to improve your vision, improve your perspective, change your perspective, make some kind of progress. And worst case scenario, you figure out that you walked the wrong direction. Okay? Now you can go walk in the other direction. And that's going to be fine. But standing there lost and not doing anything is just waiting to die, waiting to starve to death. Don't let that happen.

52:43It's over thinking. It's that anxiety. It's that ruminating that I think I've, I mean, I've done it multiple times in my life when the solution is I can't get to certainty on the problem. So I try and think my way out of the problem, which really seems to cause more harm than good. Yeah, there's definitely a level of risk conditioning that you get inside the military because there's, you're not, you're just not going to be certain about anything. And you have to be able to say, yep, I'm going to make this decision right now. And here's what we're going to do. I'm going to make the smallest decision possible.

53:19I'm going to take the smallest step possible, but I'm going to take a step because I'm never going to know everything. And if I take the time to try and know everything, everything will have changed by the time I know it. So I'm going to absolutely take that step and take that action. I mean, that's a metaphor for life as well because there's a lot of people trying to get to 100 % certainty whether to leave the job or the marriage or the start the business. And they're struggling maybe at 67, maybe 80, 90 % certainty. But for some reason, we seem to need certainty. That's why I use the, what I call the iterative decision making process.

53:54I'm only take small steps. So am I trying to leave my, I don't like my job. I'm miserable there. Okay, does that mean I walk in tomorrow morning and say, hey, boss, I hate it here, I quit? No, it doesn't mean that. It means I say, okay, I'm going to start putting my resume together. I'm going to start checking out LinkedIn. I'm going to start seeing what qualifications I might need that could improve my ability to get a new job. Once I've done that, I'm going to start sending out my resume. I'm going to start building some relationships with some people. And now I look up and I get another job offer.

54:32So I didn't make a crazy short term emotional decision. I made a slow, progressive, iterative decision making process that led me from a situation that I didn't like to an opportunity that it seems more promising. And this could apply to just about anything. I see this a lot in businesses. I see that the real cost in business. I spent about 10 years working in marketing. So I was my job as to work with the CMO and the CEO, helping them to try and make certain marketing decisions. Invest in this platform, do this thing, whatever. And I came to learn over time that the biggest cost wasn't making a bad decision.

55:12It was the time you waste the nine months waiting for Joanna to get back from annual leave so we can have a meeting with Dave and procurement to get the invoice signed off. Versus the CEOs that I worked with that said, let's do it now. When the decision was quite clearly low cost, relatively low cost or reversible. It was always speed that seemed to win out because most decisions are either reversible or actually more inconsequential than you think. Very few decisions are final. Very few decisions are final. Even something like buying a house. Should I buy this house? Oh my gosh, it seems like, yeah, if you buy a house and you decided wasn't the house that you wanted, you sell the house.

55:56Now look, could you get caught in a bad market and could, yeah, that can absolutely happen. So you need to be smart about your decisions that you make. But most things are not as final as they seem. Most things you're going to be able to and when you look, you paid the realtor, so you lost 3 % there. You paid the other realtor, you lost 3%, you had to pay the mortgage fees. So you're going to lose some money. But it's not like you buy a million dollar house and then you decide you don't like it. You don't lose a million dollars. You lose 80 grand or whatever. And it's okay, two years, three years, you get it back.

56:27So people think of decisions as being permanent. Yeah, you're fear of marketing and you approach me and you say, hey, listen CEO, there's a new marketing opportunity that we'd like to get you into. And I go, how much to cost? And you say a million dollars and I say, well, that's a lot of money. Is there, can I try it for a shorter period of time? Well, yeah, but you won't get as much volume. And I say, okay, well, still, I don't want to invest that much because I'm not sure about it. Let's test it and see where it goes. And you say, okay, we'll try that. Here's 100 grand and let's see what feedback we get.

57:04And if it's good, it's good. If it's not, we go somewhere else. Do you think you're conditioned in some ways to have this sort of biased towards taking action? Because if you're background in the sales, there was often some kind of time urgency. There was some factor that's causing you to have to take a decision. Is that? Yeah. And if there's this in life, there's not, there's not like, we're going to lose this. What someone's going to die of, there's going to be an attack. In the business world, the consequences are prolonged and usually not as extreme. So you can get away with less action. Even though eventually it will catch up with you.

57:41And you've got an example that in your book and the father's son deal and one of them takes nine months to execute. And the other one executes immediately and the one that executes immediately is successful. The one that doesn't takes nine months to execute fails. So it eventually inaction will cost you. And you say interestingly that, oh, in the SEAL teams, you must be conditioned to do this. I had to condition people to take action even in the SEAL teams. Even a young SEAL leader who you would think would be by nature aggressive and an action taker. You put them in a pressure situation where there's not a ton of information and they need to make a decision.

58:20They don't want to act either. So one of the things that I would teach was that their default mode was to be aggressive. Their default mode was to take action. I would teach that. Same thing we just discussed. I wouldn't say, hey, look, that means you have to take action. But your default setting should be, I'm going to do something. Because I'd have a young SEAL officer and there'd be some training mission and there'd be a problem in a building. And there'd be a bunch of paintball flying around in there. And he wouldn't want to go solve that problem. He'd back away from that problem. And I would have to go like push him in the back and say, you see that problem over there?

58:52You got to go solve that problem. It's not going to go away. You got to be aggressive. That's going to be your default mode is to take action and make things happen. Because most human instinct is to wait. Most human instinct is to hesitate. Most human instinct is to let things go longer and stick with the status quo. And that seems to be on the front the lowest risk in the situation is to not do anything. It usually appears to be the lowest risk. But just like the example that you gave in your book, it definitely seems lower risk. Oh, well, he wants money, he wants investment, new thing. I don't know.

59:32The lowest risk in that situation is to not do anything. And that's what many people do, whether they're in the SEAL teams or whether they're in business. So to train people to, oh, I need to take risk. Some level of risk. Take action because in the long run, I say seven out of 10. Seven out of 10 times action is better than an action. 70 % of the time action. There's definitely times where you got to hesitate. There's definitely times where you got to hold back. There's definitely, and that's the other book you got there's called the dichotomy of leadership. Because there's times, yes, absolutely action.

1:00:05Aggression. There's also times the other end of the spectrum was like, now's not the time to make a move. So it's definitely a dichotomy. But the, to me, 70 % of the time, better take that action. That's got to be a default mode. I asked you what you would, you would hardest day in the SEALs when you said about losing friends. What was your proudest day? Is there a proudest day where you go, do you know, I really showed up in a way that I was the twist -and -a -that I held myself to. And because I did, we accomplished something great together against the odds. There's a multitude of times where I was in Iraq.

1:00:50I was in a detached moment in time. You know, moving down a street, sitting in a vehicle, maneuvering, and I was watching my guys. And I could see my guys. And I could see what they were doing. And I could see one of the most beautiful things in the world, which was guys that were exceptional at their job working together as a team, maneuvering, protecting each other, accomplishing the mission. And I got to see that many times. And that's always, they had nothing to do with me. How to do with them? How to do with being able to see, look, were we perfect? No, but what are their moments when you see an element cover and move for each other?

1:01:53On the battlefield, a simple plan with the right priorities, with decentralized command, was there times when I got to see all those things? Yes. Without a doubt, those are the best days. So something about, you know, I think I've kind of seen this throughout your work, is you have a real focus on service, serving others as a path to, I guess, fulfilling yourself. And we often think, I think many people think in life that the path to self -fulfillment is to serve yourself. But it seems that you've kind of figured out that the path is by serving others. Yeah, I think that's, there's an underlying core component and belief and innate DNA in the SEAL teams.

1:02:49And that is you take care of your friends. And that's not, in fact, if you're the type of person that doesn't take care of your friends, you're not going to be a good SEAL. You're not going to be a good SEAL. If you put yourself before the team, look, you can be a great shot, you can be strong, you can be fast, all those things. But no one's going to really want you in a platoon if you put yourself above them. And people don't really talk about that. No one ever told me that, but you feel it. And if you're not self -aware, you might slip into where you're looking out for yourself and it's a problem.

1:03:33And this happens in life too. If you, it happens in business where I see a guy that he's taking care of himself. And you know, it's a smart guy and he usually thinks he's pretty smart and usually thinks he's a little bit smarter than everybody else. And usually thinks that no one else is going to notice that he's taking care of himself. And everybody sees it. And they dig themselves a grave. They dig themselves a grave. And I'm not saying they don't get away with it a little bit. Usually they get a couple of promotions, they get to a spot. But ultimately, people don't want to work with that person.

1:04:07And so they burn their relationships and they don't do as well as they should. And which is the kind of nice thing is if you take care of other people, they'll take care of you. If you screw over other people, you're going to get screwed over. So yeah, I think there's definitely that underlying theme in the SEAL teams. I've seen it now in business. And it is going to... If you look out for yourself all the time, it's going to catch up with you. I think everyone can relate. If anyone's ever worked in a business and they have colleagues, I think everyone will be able to think about the colleague who is always seeking credit, is always being selfish in the way that they're showing up.

1:05:00And then they can also think about the colleague who's the complete opposite of that. And it's often... It's funny, it was making me think as you were speaking, that leadership is in fact in many respects, it's given it's not taken. I, the person that's showing up for other people, but also delivering on their own work, is often kind of elected the leader of the group. We talk a lot in business. I think it was Steve Jobs that said, the very, very best leaders in my organization with those that were so good at their job. And they wouldn't ever thinking about like being a leader, but that's the reason they ultimately became it.

1:05:31When people ask me and I got a book, I wrote, called Leadership Strategy and Tactics, like how to get promoted, how do you get promoted? Don't worry about getting promoted. Focus on the team, focus on the mission, focus on doing a good job, focus on supporting your teammates. If you do those things, you're going to get promoted. And it takes... You'll have this... You know, the dark part of your personality will say, yeah, but they're not going to notice. They need to see me now. And you'll raise your head and say, I want credit for that. And the minute you do that, the minute you raise your hand and say, give me credit, your credit goes down.

1:06:03It's an unfortunate truth. The minute you ask for the accolades, your accolades are decreased, because you're looking out for yourself and everyone can smell that. They don't like it. Yeah, you're saying that I'm more important than the mission in some respects. Yeah. Terrible. Terrible. Did you have people like that in the services when you were out there? People that were clearly selfish in the sales? Yeah. How did you deal with that? Well, if they were my boss, then I would make them look good.

1:06:42Build a great relationship with them. If they weren't more my peer, I'd make them look good. Build a great relationship with them.

1:06:54I think that as you, you know, some people that have that kind of, you know, they've got some kind of, is it a defect? I think it's probably a little bit of a defect, but they just, they just feel like they need that recognition. They feel like they need to take care of themselves. And again, going back to what I said earlier, like, what do they do? They go through in their life that make some think that they got to look out for themselves. And it'd be kind of nice if I could be a person that they go, man, this guy's treating me really good. And maybe I could help them transform from someone that doesn't trust that they're going to get the recognition that they need to, hey, there's good people out there, and I'd like to be a part of this team.

1:07:43Will you have a successful in that transformation? I was successful. I was also unsuccessful. You know, some people are, some people they have that defect and it's strong. And they're going to look out for themselves. And there's very little you can do about it. And you, you know, you try, try. But it's a very, the ego is a very, very powerful thing. I mean, you know, the ego is so powerful that there's countless cases of military history where a human being got himself and possibly his troops or his troops killed because of his ego. So if you can die because of your ego, you can absolutely make some pretty dramatic mistakes in the business world because of your ego.

1:08:31And it happens all the time. It happens all the time.

1:08:36Leaving the military. I have this quote where you said, so I'd say if there's anything that I struggle with now, it's just that does anything else matter. And the answer is no. The answer is no. Nothing else matters. Nothing else is close. So I have to deal with that. You said that on the Tim Ferriss podcast, talking about your time in the services, but also more specifically the Battle of Romardy. Romardy? Mm -hmm. As being the highlight of your life. How does one go through sort of 20 years of high intensity combat and all that adrenaline and all of the, you know, gosh, it's harder to think of many greater senses of like purpose and fulfillment and mission and then real life?

1:09:26Yeah. So number one, as I mentioned earlier, remember but don't dwell. And have you seen the movie Napoleon Dynamite? No, that's a bummer. There's a character in the movie Napoleon Dynamite. His name is Uncle Rico. And Uncle Rico played football in high school. And now Uncle Rico lives in a van and sells cookingware. So he kind of peaked in high school. And he lives in the past. He's always talking about state championships. And if he would have had that extra point and if coach would have put him in, he's got, he's living in the past. And so while that quote right there, no doubt that you just read from me, Zachary, I mean, there will not be, I don't think, anything in my life that will have as much intensity, as much mission focus, as much meaning, as much opportunity, as much loss.

1:10:37Like that is, combat is like life but amplified and intensified. So every emotion that you have, like you have an emotion when you, when you formulate a new plan and when you sell a business or buy a business, you have emotions. That's like combat, but it's amplified, it's intensified, and it's a lot more. So that quote that you read is true. Nothing will compare to that. It won't. But I don't want to be like Uncle Rico living in the past, talking about how this is what it used to be like. And if only, yeah, there's my big game. I don't want to do that. I want to, as I said earlier, I want to remember, but I don't want to do all in the past.

1:11:17Has ever crossed your mind to go back in any capacity? Oh, yeah. Of course, yeah. Every time like a, every time a war breaks out somewhere, you, you, you want to get your, get your knife out, sharpen it up, and let's rock and roll. Of course, because, yeah, well, because of that quote right there, like this is, this is it. Like that's, that's it. I'm lucky that I got to do what I got to do. You know, like, that's a blessing. That's a, it's, it's, it's what I wanted to do since I was a little kid. And I got to do it. And so if you asked me if I got the chance to do it again, what I, yeah, I was 100%.

1:11:59You could there, right? You could go, be involved in some capacity and the, you see, yeah. There's ways, there's things that I could do to, you know, like be a gun sunger again and all that. But there's also, it's also not the same. So, you know, if I, because I retired from the Navy and, and so I'm not in the military anymore, I still work with the military, I still train the military. But to go and be a gun slinger again, now you're, now you're doing something different. Now you are mercenary. Now it's a different situation. And the, that component that you talked about of, like mission, brotherhood is not going to be the same for me.

1:12:44And, and quite frankly, I think that I, part of me, wants to not sour that memory and, and all those memories. I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to sour that memory. I got a beautiful, beautiful memory. And then I don't want to tarnish it with me chasing around the past. You know, in fighters, they retired from fighting. And then they, they just, they, they want to go back, they do it again and it's just not the same. Andeson Silva was not like that for me. He was Superman and then he went back a couple of times. And I didn't want to watch him get in B up.

1:13:29It was like, yeah. I know. That's how that's, that's a, I feel like that. I feel like that. I don't, don't think I could rematch my, my, Anderson Silva, the spider champion, Chipron. I don't think I could rematch that. Discipline is freedom. The title of your, your book here. Discipline equals freedom. Now that seems like it's untrue because when people think of discipline, they think of rigidity and can, and taking away their freedom, having to be disciplined. Why is, why does discipline equal freedom?

1:14:07Because the more discipline you have in your life, the more freedom you will end up with.

1:14:14So if you lack the discipline to exercise and eat healthy, you will end up being a slave to disease. If you lack the discipline to work hard, save your money, you will end up a slave to finances. If you lack the discipline to manage your time correctly, you will end up with no free time. If you have self -discipline, if you have the discipline to save your money and work hard and invest your money properly, if you have the discipline to manage your time correctly and not waste a bunch of time, if you have the discipline to exercise and eat healthy, you will end up with freedom. And it's, I know it's a counterintuitive, it's contrarian, but I've seen this over and over and over again.

1:15:22If you want freedom in your life, you have to have discipline.

1:15:29It's going to be some kid listening to this now. I always think about the personas that are listening and they are, you know, eating Doritos off their belly. Spit them out.

1:15:44Spit them out. Start now. Because if you're a kid right now and you're eating Doritos off your belly, I know they taste good and there's some immediate gratification and I get that, but I'm going to tell you it starts right now. Throw that bag of Doritos away. Get rid of it. Go do some push ups. Go spend $12 at the hardware store and hang up a pull up bar in your room. And start doing pull ups and if you can't do one pull up, hang on that bar. And you're going to start to get a little bit stronger. You just start to get a little bit healthier. You're going to start to get more focused. You're going to start to become more resilient.

1:16:20And you're going to start to be able to do a pull up and you're going to start to eat healthy all the time. And you're going to start to understand the world better. And you're going to start to progress in every aspect of your life. And you'll see that if you have that kind of discipline right now, you're going to end up with freedom. And if you don't have that kind of discipline and you keep eating those Doritos and you don't work hard and you don't exercise and you don't apply yourself, you're going to end up. You're going to end up shackled. You're going to shackled by a boss that you don't like doing a job that you don't like to do with sicknesses and diseases that you don't want.

1:17:17Relying on people that you can't even count on alone. And you don't have to.

1:17:31But if you have discipline, if you have discipline, you will attain freedom.

1:17:43And it starts with just spitting the Doritos out starts with spitting the Doritos out. Yes, indeed. One of the key one is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead. And over the course of my career, I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places, one which has helped me across many of my investments is NetSuite. They're also a sponsor of this podcast. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform. You'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place.

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1:18:50Is this idea of waking up early? Now I'm not someone that wakes up early. I know you know long clock and you're usually up by 11. Well, I, so no meetings before 11. Okay, so I stay up quite late. Yep. What's the best case you could give me for changing that? And do I need to change that? Because what I, what I do is, you know, I flew into LA on jet lags and flying back in a couple of days. I'm going to be jet lags when I land as well. So what I'm trying to do is just protect my sleep at all costs because I've come to learn that it's really the foundation of my performance. So if I, if I'm unslaped and I show up at work, the chance that I'm not going to show up correctly in a variety of ways, emotionally, creatively, whatever is high.

1:19:32And that for me is the greatest risk. Yeah. So I just, I've, in the last sort of year or two of my life, I've just said, okay, pro auto sleep, because then everything else seems to follow. But when I heard that you wake up sometimes at 4 .45 or 4 .30, like pretty much all the time. And you, I've literally seen you on social media, upload your, your alarm clock day after day after day. Okay, shit, maybe I should rethink. No, I think if you're, if you got a system that's working well for you, and then I wouldn't change anything. Right? If you feel like you're performing well, you're physically healthy, you're getting all the work done that you need to do.

1:20:07You're a naturally more of a late night, late morning type person. I'd run with it. It's, if you were telling me, yeah, sometimes I get up, sometimes I don't, sometimes I work late, sometimes I don't. I'm not, don't work out every day. You know, sometimes I feel groggy. If you were telling me that kind of thing, I'd say, okay, pick a time and start waking up at that time every day. Doesn't have to be 4 .40, it could be 8 o 'clock, could be 7 o 'clock. Doesn't matter. It could be 11 o 'clock, but try and go to bed around the same time and try and wake up around the same time. And that's going to be a great foundation for everything that you're doing.

1:20:44And I would say when you wake up in the morning, do some kind of exercise. Because I think that is very helpful in getting your day started correctly. What are your non -negotiables and your life in times of habits, routines, disciplines? I wake up early and I work out every day. That's kind of my, that's, that's, those are the minimum requirements in my life. Trainger Jitsu, I don't get to train, train Jitsu every single day, but if I can train Jitsu, I'm going to train Jitsu. I'm going to work out every day. If I can surf, I'm going to surf, you know. I obviously have to work every day. I work every day doing something.

1:21:30You know, I've got a bunch of different companies. I got to write books, podcasts, so I work every day. Are you ever in discipline? Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. Chocolate chip cookies. They're a discipline lapse for me. Yeah, so yeah, I'm not a cyborg. When people look at someone like you, that's, you know, done all the things you've done. You've been in a seal and you've, you've read all these books and started these companies. And actually the drink I'm drinking now is one of your products, which is the, what's that in front of you there? Yeah, it's an energy drink called the girl. Cool go. Delicious, by the way.

1:22:08Well, thank you. I think my mouth has been connected to my brain during this interview, so I think it's working. I understand this misconceptions that people have of me, because they assume, it's kind of like the halo effect. We assume because someone's done something well, they do all things well. But there are so many things that I think would really liberate people and make them inspired if they could see how deficient I was in so many things in my life. You know, because they just assume that if you've done one thing, well, you have a good podcast, you must be like, you know, the perfect picture of what are the big misconceptions generally moving away from this idea of imperfection, but just generally about Jokko, because you've, you realize you've become a bit of a character, right?

1:22:50You know, like Navy SEAL that comes with an identity package. Yeah, I think the biggest misconception I think, and it's not just me, but it's really the military in general, is the misconception of this kind of authoritarian, authoritarian dictatorship from a leadership perspective. And even when we were having this conversation, I said, I'm going to let, I'm going to let my subordinates plan. And you kind of had a stomach look on your face, like, what are you talking about? Why would you let your subordinates plan? And so there's an idea and a misconception that the leader is going to stand up and bark all the orders.

1:23:30So that's one misconception. Another one is I look like a Neanderthal. And so people think I'm going to scream and yell at everybody and I never yell at anybody. You know, my business partner, Lafabin, who's worked with me, who's in my task unit at SEAL Team 3 and deployed to Ravati with me. And we now, we've written a couple books together, we have a business together. And he was like my direct subordinate in Ravati and during a workup and, you know, like I never yelled at him. And he likes to point out that he gave me plenty of reasons to yell at him, but never yell at him because what, what could is that?

1:24:09And by the way, if I have to yell at somebody, what does that say? That means if I have to yell at you to get my point across as a leader, I've made like 47 other mistakes. My goal is that I don't even have to say anything. That's my goal as a leader. My goal is I don't have to say a word and you already know what to do and you make it happen. And I look at you and give you a thumbs up and say good job. That's my goal. So I think the biggest misconception is the idea of someone in the military or myself being a authoritarian leader, being very close -minded. I got asked a question the other day about, you know, if you were, if China attacked Taiwan and you were taking troops in there, what would you be focused on?

1:24:52And I said, I'd be focused on keeping an open mind because if you have a closed mind about what the mission is, about how it's going to happen, about what your troops are going to do, about what the enemy is going to do. If you have a closed mind about those things, you're going to get caught off guard. You have to have an open mind. You have to be accepting of the information that you're receiving. You have to be accepting of the other ideas that other people have. And if you have a closed mind, you're going to fall apart. Kind of counterintuitive in some ways because the reason people often think they've been made the leader because they have loads of the correct ideas.

1:25:28So I think as people often climb in life, they go, well, I've been right so much that they've put me here as CEO. So now I need to defend my righteousness or all costs, even when I'm not, you know, sure, because that's a weakness. Yeah. And you quoted Steve Jobs earlier. And I think actually it's from your book, which was, I don't hire people so I can tell them what to do. I hire good people so they can tell me what to do. So yes. In a leadership position, you should be listening more than you should be talking. You were talking a second ago about shouting and aggression. It made me, as you're saying, I was thinking, you know, there is a stereotype that a man is aggressive and he shouts and all those things.

1:26:13You know, there's a bit of a stereotype there. What I was actually thinking is, it's never been so unclear what a man is. Then it then in 2024 in the context of how a man's men are show up, are they men are being masculine or feminine or somewhere in between or whatever. And for many men, you are a man's man. You know, when we think of Navy sales, we go, men. So I was wondering because it's never been as clear, I think, what a man should be. You know, when you're raising a kid, that's a man or when you're being a man yourself. What do you think a man should be? And I want to give a bit more context here.

1:26:55There's a lot of men struggling right now. There's a lot of men, if you know, I talk about it a lot, that if you look at the stats around suicidality in the UK, the thing that's most likely to kill someone between the age of like 18 and 40 years themselves for a man. You know, there's a to men are clearly struggling in some capacity with purpose or or meaning or something. So I almost feel like, you know, a lot of these sort of toxic influences of what a man should be of now merged to offer answers. But I doubt those toxic influences and I say there's going to be another role model, another sort of blueprint for what it is to show up as a man.

1:27:29Well, I was going to give you a real, I guess it would have been a real cheap answer of I think it's Marcus Relius is stop discussing what it is to be a man and be one. I was going to I was going to walk out of here with that one. I'm pretty good question of avoidance there, which but there's some merit to that, right? Like, and I was almost thinking like, do we really not know? Do we really not know what it is to be a good man? And I would go so far as to say to be a good human being, right? Because when a few years ago, there was these, there was these discussions going around about toxic masculinity, right?

1:28:07And you take these traditional masculine traits and people are saying this is toxic masculinity and they're bad. And I wrote a couple articles about it. If you take any trait of a human being and you take it to an extreme masculine or feminine or otherwise, you take it to an extreme, it's going to be a problem. It doesn't matter what it is. So if you take even a really positive trait like generosity, if you're a super generous person, that's wonderful. Is it possible to be too generous? Well, yes, it is. Now you're getting taken advantage of it. Now you end up in an abusive relationship like there's all kinds of problems that can happen.

1:28:51So when we talk about masculine traits and what's the man? Well, what are some of the traditional masculine traits to be competitive? Now, is it bad to be hyper competitive where you screw people over and you hurt your health because you want to win in this particular category? Is that bad? Yes, it is. Does that mean we have people that are not competitive at all? They don't care if they win or lose. No, that's not good either. So that's one trait. What's another good mask aggression? Aggression is a masculine trait. Is it good if I'm walking into a restaurant pushing the hostess out of my way?

1:29:34Of course, that's terrible. It's terrible. Is it good if you and I are working together and I say, hey, shut up and do what I said. Is that good? Nope, it's not good. So can you take aggression too far? Yes, you absolutely can. Can you get to a point where you're not even asserting yourself at all and you're getting what? Yes, you can. Is that good? No, that's not good either. So there's a bunch of traits that we could run through that are considered traditional masculine traits. And if you take any of those traits and you take them to an extreme, they're going to be bad. Stoicism, right? Being stoic, being unemotional.

1:30:08Is it good to have no emotions whatsoever? No, that's called a sociopath, right? Is that good? No. Is it good? Like I was talking about earlier to let your emotions run your life and make your decisions based on your emotions? No, that's not good either. What do we want to be as a human as a man? Want to be balanced? Want to be a want to be balanced? You don't want to be extreme in any direction. Even when do you ask me like, oh, Jockel, what are you undisciplined on? I told you chocolate chip cookies. I could have also said, yeah, sometimes I like to eat a mint chocolate chip milkshakes. Sometimes I get lazy to work out.

1:30:49I'm like, you know what? I freaking warmed up and this sucks. I'm leaving. Sometimes I'm supposed to I was going to write something and now I didn't write anything. I'm supposed to write a thousand words today. I didn't write any. Guess what? I didn't write it tomorrow. I'm a slacker. So if I was so disciplined that, you know, my wife was like, hey, I'd like to go out for dinner. I was like, no, I still got to write my thousand words. Is that good? No, it's not good. So any, any characteristic if we take it to extreme, it's going to be a problem. And so we as people should be balanced. And I think what we need to be attuned to is it's much easier to be extreme.

1:31:28It's much easier to be extreme. It's much easier to say, oh, no emotions cool and turn them off. That's easier than or or a total emotion mayhem. That's easier. It's harder to find balance. It's harder to find balance in business. It's harder to find balance in life. It's hard to find balance. And what we have to do is we have to be attuned to the feedback that we're getting. We have to be attuned to the feedback that we're getting. So if we're talking to our wife and she says, you're not going to be home for dinner again tonight for the ninth night in a row that you're going to stay late at work.

1:32:07Okay, you need to be paying attention enough to say, oh, yeah, guess what? I'm a little too focused on work right now. And then the other end of that spectrum is my boss says, hey, Jaco, you're leaving early again. Well, you know, it's resting season. My daughter's got a resting match. So I'm going to leave. Okay, I need to be attuned enough to say, yeah, if I focus 100 % on my job, I'm going to lose my family. If I focus 100 % of my family, I'm going to lose my job. We as humans are supposed to be balanced. And by the way, there's going to be some things that we don't control somebody asked me the other day.

1:32:41What did I learn about myself?

1:32:57I learned that I don't let the highs and lows affect me too much because we're going to have wins. We're going to have losses. We're going to have successes. We're going to have failures. We're going to have good nights. We're going to have bad nights. We're going to have good relationships. We're going ahead of bad relationships. We're going to have good ideas and bad ideas and make money. We're going to lose money. All these things are going to happen. And if you oscillate emotionally up and down drastically, it's going to be problematic. So finding a good stable centred way. to be and look at the world and take everything that you see with a little bit of a grain of salt and don't get swayed too drastically in one direction or the other, you're going to be okay.

1:33:57And if I was to try and sum up some of this idea about being a man or being a good human, it's like those books I wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. That number one, take responsibility for what you're doing, take ownership of your world, take ownership of your life. There's number one. Number two, the second book, dichotomy of leadership, be balanced. Be balanced. Don't be extreme. Extreme, look, do you have to sometimes get out there in the fringes a little bit? Occasionally, you probably had some business situations where you're like, all right, I got to let go half of my staff right now.

1:34:34That's an extreme move, but that's how we're going to start. Do you have to do that sometimes? Yes, you do. But don't let that be where you live. Live in the center. Live in a stable area and then finally just playing equals freedom. A couple of words you use throughout this conversation make me want to add some things to that list of what it takes to be a, maybe not a good man, but at least a happy and fulfilled man. One of the words you used is brotherhood. And I was thinking about all the things you got from your time in the Seals. And it's almost a bit of like a microcosm of what I think a lot of men are looking for.

1:35:03You know, that sense of purpose, that brotherhood. And they find it these days in like video games and stuff, right? Which are video games. I've got a, you know, I cost no judgment on people that play video games. I've played video games my whole life. But it seems like there's a reason we're getting increasingly addicted to these video games because they're giving us something that we're searching for in real life and not getting. Use the words brotherhood purpose. These are things that the Seals clearly have in huge amounts. Is there anything else that you'd add to that list of what it takes to feel fulfilled?

1:35:35Yeah, jujitsu. It almost says become a joke amongst me, my friends, people that listen to me is you've got some kind of a problem in the world. You got some kind of problem in your life. Go train jujitsu. There's a reason why I say that because the things that you just mentioned, discipline, guess what you need to go train jujitsu when you're tired and you don't feel like it. Discipline. Guess how you feel when you're done. You feel awesome. You get a bunch of dopamine. Guess who you're there with. A bunch of dudes that you can relate to and guess what you're going to do together. You're going to struggle.

1:36:08You're going to go through some hardship together. You're going to sweat. You're going to choke. You're going to get your arm broken like these things are going to happen. Not going to get your arm broken, but you may. But you're going to be with a little brotherhood. And by the way, women train jujitsu to my daughter's all train jujitsu. It's all good. It's all good. So yeah, jujitsu is one way. Now look, could you go to the rock climbing gym? Yes, you could. Could you go to the CrossFit gym? Yes, you could. Could you go to the soccer field, football field, whatever. Yeah, you can do that stuff.

1:36:47So yeah, go do that stuff. Go do that stuff. That's shared suffering together with a group on a regular basis, whether you want to or not. That's some, those are all little components of being in the military, being in the seal teams. That's what it is. That's what you're doing. What does the seal afternoon do? They train to get ready for go to war. How do they do that? They go to the desert. They carry their guns. They run through little choreographed moves. They get hot. They carry weight. It's suffering. It's just shared suffering and they're working together and they're learning skills. That's what you're doing in a jujitsu gym.

1:37:24That's what you're doing on the soccer field. So go out and do those things with other human beings and it's going to make things better for sure. It made me think of business as well. Business should be that way. If you're in an organization, you're doing the exact same thing, right? We've got a problem. We need to solve it. We've got to allocate resources. We've got to come in late tonight. We've got to make this thing happen. We've got an emergency. Like, that's what a business is too. That's the way it should be. It should be we're working together to solve problems. And when we're successful, we get rewarded for that.

1:37:57So yes, this is called human interaction. I'm sorry that it looks like war is the best way to do it. It's not. I would much rather people start a business and create a product and create jobs. I would much rather people do that. And you can find that same kind of camaraderie in business. In fact, it's interesting. I have a consulting business and so we work with companies and companies that went through the 2008 economic downfall. Those, they're so bonded because they went through this traumatic experience together. Companies that did well out of the gate, they're not, people are leaving and people are coming.

1:38:39But companies that went through some trauma together, they stick together. So, yeah, if you frame things right in your life, if you frame things, if you frame a business challenge as an opportunity to build a stronger team, if you frame a personal challenge as an opportunity to overcome and improve yourself, these things that seem so horrible are actually very positive components of your existence and they're going to make you better. As you said that, I thought, damn, I should take all of my teams. We should go do like a survival week. We have, we run a program like that at SONF RUN, where we teach, we teach people like some basic tactics and we have these high speed laser tag guns and we send them out on missions and there's explosions and there's gunfire and there's role players that are screaming and yelling and it's, it's maham.

1:39:40And those teams that go through that, they bond. They also learn how to make decisions under pressure. They also learn how to detach. They also learn the fundamental principles of combat leadership that you can apply not just to the battlefield, but you can apply to business and you can apply to your life as well. So, yes, is that helpful? It absolutely is. Struggles sucks. Depends on how you frame it. Right? Depends on how you frame it. Because I'm thinking about you stood at the beach, you know, and they say walk out, Jocco, link on some walk out. You described that as sucking. Yeah. But what you're also saying is there's huge value in things that suck on the other side of something that sucks is something worth cherishing.

1:40:27I would say not just huge value, but the value, the value. You want to know if you're, you're talking about young men that might not have any direction right now, go, go do something that's hard. Go try and accomplish something that's hard. You may win. You may lose. You may succeed. You may fail. I'll tell you what, you'll be better. If you avoid those things that are hard, if you don't accept that challenge, if you don't step up and step into that cold water and you sit on your couch and eat Doritos, I can tell you this is not a good move. This is not a good move. Don't do that. Don't do that.

1:41:14Just get up. Move towards that challenge. Whatever that challenge is. Move towards that challenge. Go attack it. You may be successful, you may not be successful, but you will be better. The next challenge, you're going to be more prepared for. The next challenge, after that, you're going to be more prepared for. You're going to fail. You're going to fail. You're going to fail. You're going to fail. And then you're going to win.

1:41:50And that's life. Life without those challenges, it's just existence. Don't just exist. Go live.

1:42:09You used the word balance a second ago. And from reading through your story, it appears that when you were in the sales, you didn't have a whole lot of work life balance. In whatever way people will define work life balance, and talking specifically about your relationships, your family, your wife. I'm right in saying that you were out of balance through that season of life in terms of, you know, yes, I was out of balance. I was out of balance. I was out of balance.

1:42:47But the ship was still moving in the right direction. So what does that mean? That means that my wife picked up the slack. That's what she did. So I was out of balance. She recognized it. She recognized that I had a job. And that that job was important. She recognized that I was going to war. I was taking guys to war.

1:43:19My decisions could mean the lives of these guys, the deaths of these guys. My wife understood that.

1:43:32My wife understood that what I needed to focus on at that time was making sure that my guys and me were prepared for war. That has to be the focus.

1:43:47To not focus on that means I might not be coming home. Means some of those guys might not be coming home. She understood that. She knew that. She stepped up. She, I was out of balance. She was in balance. She pulled the family unit into balance. And I treated my wife like a princess. I mean, I never, I never, I mean, I gave my wife everything. Except for time. I could not always give her the time that she deserved. She never complained about it one time.

1:44:35That's legit.

1:44:44She knew.

1:44:55She knew that. She understood it. The team. First off, combat leadership's cover move. We worked together as a team. While I was doing my job, while I was serving the team, I was in a country she covered for me. Where I couldn't deliver on the home front. With three kids and then four kids, she covered the finances, the water heater that's broken, the car tire that needs changing, she did all that stuff. I can see the emotion in your face when you say that. And is that come from? What is that emotion?

1:45:46That's appreciation.

1:45:53It's appreciation. It's like, I'm gone. And she's there. She just know what's going to happen to me. There's no phone coming home. She got three freaking kids running around. Like, and this is my wife. Guess what? There's hundreds of thousands of military wives that did the same thing. And spouses as well. Because there's guys that are married to females that go on deployment as well. That hold the line and do the job on the home front.

1:46:33And they don't get the appreciation. The outward appreciation, the recognition that the people that are in the military get. But they deserve it. Do you think you could ever express the gratitude you have for her in words? Do you think, Jim think it's possible for her to know how much you appreciate her for holding the line and for covering you? Do I think I could express it? In words, probably not. Does she know? Yes, she does. Jocke, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. They leave it in this book.

1:47:22Question that's been left for you. If you could bring someone back who's no longer with us and have a conversation with them, who would it be and what would that conversation entail?

1:47:42Well, I'd bring back Mark Lee, Mikey Montsore and Ryan Job.

1:47:54And I tell him, thank you.

1:48:11Thank you.

1:48:19What would you be thanking them for?

1:48:25Everything.

1:48:35Okay, thank you. Thank you for, I mean, the list is quite extensive, but thank you for putting your life on the line to make the world a better place. That's, I think, a level of gratitude and appreciation that we can't really express in words to people like you that put your lives on the line and sometimes don't come back from more and put your families through it. Things that the average person, frankly, wouldn't be willing to do for the sake of an important cause. Thank you for that. Thank you on behalf of all of the people that will never be able to say it to you. Thank you for what you're doing in this chapter of your life because you are maybe whether you know it or not, you are saving, improving and changing lives with everything you do with your incredible podcast with all the books you've written, you've written this, you know, you're writing children's books as well now to try and help shift the mindset of people at the very well, they're still seeds and they're formative.

1:49:31I think that's also going to change and prove lives and thank you for all the inspiration you've given me over the years because you'll never get to see all of the people who hear a line that you say the way that you say it, the stories that you tell. And for some of those people, it's just the subtle nod, nudge that they need to take that first step to spit the dirty throughout and to change their lives. You know, when I think about my friendship circle and I told, told some of my friends that I was speaking to today, those are young men and women that can all pinpoint the moment where they encountered you and they can pinpoint how it moved their life forward in some way.

1:50:05You'll never meet these millions of millions of people, but I just want you to know for sure that they're there and they're watching now and they've been watching and they'll continue to watch. So, Jocky, thank you. It's been an honor. It was an honor to serve and thanks for having me on here. Appreciate it.

1:50:30Mhm.

1:50:36Mhm.

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