Essentials: How to Become Resilient, Forge Your Identity & Lead Others | Jocko Willink

Huberman Lab

Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL and leadership expert, joins Andrew Huberman to discuss resilience, identity formation, and disciplined action as tools for personal and professional mastery. Drawing from his military exp

Key takeaways

• Jocko Willink joined the military with a 'blank slate' mindset, realizing early that performance leads to autonomy and long-term control over one's destiny.

Transcript preview

Speaker 1: Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. Speaker 1: I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Jocko Willink. Jock Willink, welcome. Thanks for having me, man. In my view, and I think in the view of a lot of people, you embody discipline. So today I definitely want to talk about routines, but also mindset. but also things that you do and ways that you approach things that might not contradict but not be so obvious to people might be a little bit counterintuitive. There are generators and projectors and generators are people that are just from a very young age. They realize they can impact other people. They want to create things in the world. And then there are these projectors that like to just kind of reflect on what they see. And it's not the generators are good in projectors are bad. The world needs both, that they really work in a kind of symbiotic way. But your story captures the essence of what it is to be a generator, which is that by doing certain things, you can have an impact and it feeds back to you. And it's likely that they receive something from it as well. Yeah. And where this all came to fruition, as I now piece together as you're talking through this stuff, look, when I join the military, you join the military and you get a blank slate. No one cares what you got on the SATs or the, and no one cares about anything. You're a blank slate. And then with that blank slate, it is, hey, if you do this thing, if you perform this task and you perform it well, you will get recognition. You will hopefully get more control over your own destiny, which is the ultimate in compensation for human beings. To have more control over your own destiny, you can have all the money in the world. But if you don't control what you're doing every day, or at least you don't control most of what you're doing, then it's not worth it. The reason people try and make money so they can have more autonomy in their life. And so in the military, it became very clear to me very quickly that if I performed well, I actually got a lot more freedom with what I did. That's when I started to realize, oh, what I'm doing right now is it going to impact not only what's going to happen to me in the next hour, but in the next two years, three years, five years, the more I focused on doing things that are going to positively impact my future, the better my life became. And I think that's a very huge lesson to learn that I know I didn't figure out for quite some time. I get the impression, and I think everyone gets the impression that you're somebody with a lot of energy. And I wonder whether or not you wake up with a lot of energy and you feel like you have to burn it off with this physical activity and work and other demand. And you're not, you're demands in your life, or do you find that you wake up and your energy is kind of neutral? And exercise and physical activity gives you energy. I would say it's both, right? There's no way I can sit here and say, oh, yeah, every day that alarm clock goes off. And I'm like, oh, yeah, let's rock and roll. Certainly that's not the case. It's also certainly not the case that every day I'm like, oh, God, not again. No, I'd say most of the time, the alarm clock goes off. And I don't think a bunch. Like when my alarm clock goes off, I don't debate with myself. I'm not negotiating. I just, the thing goes off and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. It's sort of robotic. Now, this much I can say. When you go and work out, you're going to feel better. You will get energy from working out. You go break a sweat, you're going to feel better. You're going to get more energy from it. And look, you got to go really, really hard to where now you feel more tired when you're done. And even that, I mean, you've got to go psycho. I'll do that occasionally, but I don't do that on a daily basis. you know, at the end of a day, if I wake up, lift, run, surf, and then I do Tai Chi in the afternoon, like at the end of that day, I'm tired and I feel tired. But normal day, working out just makes you feel better. Definitely gives you energy. Definitely gives me energy. The idea that movement and exercise gives us energy, I think is an important idea. And it's something that I was, frankly, I was hoping your answer would be that, as opposed to that. You know, you wake up every day and you just want to just attack the world because you have so much energy getting out of bed because frankly, I never feel that way. But I always feel better after I train. Do you nourish after you train or do you find that eating slows you down? I find that eating slows me down. So, no, I don't eat a big meal until I'm kind of done with the physical stuff for the day, which is usually at night, six, seven o'clock at night, which I guess there's some bad things about that. I eat too late. Well, the data say, you know, if you're having a regular meal. meal schedule that allows you to sleep well at night, whatever that means for you, and that allows you to be active and focused when you need to be active and focused, that's the ideal schedule. When I'm working with clients, like so I have a leadership consulting company, Eshlon Front. When I'm going to work with the client, I'm not eating. Because they're going to be asking me questions. We're going to be diving into what's happening inside their business. Like there's a lot of stuff going on. It's a lot of cognitive work. Podcast, I'm not eating before a podcast. Before I'm recording a podcast, I'm not eating because I don't want to have a bunch of food in my stomach. I want to, you get a certain level of mental clarity. when you haven't eaten a bunch of food. So going out on missions, I never would eat before I go out on a mission. I would eat when I come home. You get home 4 o'clock in the morning, 3 o'clock in the morning from doing operation. Cool, then I'll eat. Because then I'm going to do a debrief for 15 minutes, clean weapons, and then eat a big meal, go to sleep. Cool. Yeah, I don't want to have food in my stomach when I've got to perform or execute anything. So much of what you embody and what you do, I think centers around this idea of discipline, of course, but also energy. It's the intuitive sense I get about why people are so drawn to your messaging and what you do and how you do it. Are there certain forms of exercise like weightlifting versus cardio that you find give you an especially big boost in what we're calling energy? And here, this could be cognitive energy, it could be physical energy, but a readiness for the next thing. I would have to say like the high intensity sort of anaerobic blast, you know, whether it's on the bike or on the rower or, you know, swinging a kettlebell hard, something like that, that last 10, 15 minutes, that's a really good way to, you know, peak my mentality for the day. When you were in the teams, what was your observation about how winning and losing would impact people in the short and long term? From the perspective of leadership, and maybe more importantly, from the perspective of yourself, how do you work with that? How do you calibrate wins and losses? How do you transmute losses into energy? because wins we know convert to energy, but losses oftentimes can sap our energy way, way down. To start with, I think that the selection process to get into the SEAL teams is going to weed out a bunch of people that can't recover very quickly from something bad. The kid that was the star of the football team, the star of the basketball team, the captain of this, the captain of that, he's been winning his whole life. He goes to Buds and he quits. Because in Buds, you're not going to win. you're certainly not going to win everything. They're going to find what you're not good at, and they're going to exploit that, and you're going to lose. A lot of guys that may lose and it disrupts their motivation, they're probably just going to quit. And so that's why you get this massive attrition rate with guys that are studs. Division one athlete, Division one wrestlers, division one football players, division one runners and swimmers. They all come to buds. They all quit. Not all of them quit, but there's plenty. of examples of the highest level of collegiate athlete in sports that translate very well to what you're doing in basic seal training and they quit and sometimes it's because they don't know how to lose they don't know how to recover from a loss so i think already and once you get to a seal team you've got people that are generally speaking going to be pretty resilient when it comes to dealing with a loss. Now, once you're in the teams and what you're talking about is now you start taking much more significant loss. You're not losing a race. You're losing one of your friends. And this is what from a leadership perspective, you have to pay attention to. So when you're a leader in any organization, you're basically in charge of a mob. When it comes to what their morale is, and they feed off of each other just like a mob riding in the streets, going, oh, we can break this window, let's break all the windows. And they move this mob mentality. And that happens with morale inside of a team. And you as a leader can't get caught up with the mob. You have to detach yourself from the mob mentally so that you don't get caught up in their emotions and their morale. Because if you get caught up in their emotions and you get caught up in their morale, you can't correct it. So we go out on a mission. The mission goes great. We get into a gunfight, kill a couple bad guys, everyone's okay, high fives, everyone's feeling great. You come back to base. Hey, we don't need to debrief. That was perfect. Hey, we don't need to get our gear, you know, maintained. We