Jocko Willink and Mike Sarraille - Helping Veterans Transition into the Private Sector

Um, alright guys, well, thanks for hosting me to a podcast at the Jocko podcast studio. For those of our listeners that don't know about you guys, I think we should start with some quick intros and then start talking about the new program you're working on.

So Xhaka, why don't you start off?

Cool. I was in the military for twenty years and then I retired. When I retired, I started working with civilians primarily and teaching them about leadership that I had learned was in the military. Mm-hmm. And that culminated in a book, you know, another that ended up kind of morphing into a book called “Extreme Ownership.” That book came out and that book done pretty well and that kind of morphed into a podcast. So I have a podcast called Jockle Podcast where I talk about really human nature through the lens of leadership and war and general atrocities and struggles other than human beings go through. So it's a little bit of a rough podcast to listen to from time to time, but there’s a lot of lessons in it.

Yeah, I mean it's, uh, it really contrasts from the average podcast in the sense that it’s sort of like you reading a book every single week or every other week and just going through giving notes based on your experience.

Yeah, it’s interesting too because I get most of the books that I try and use are first-person accounts, right, of these situations. So whether it's war, whether it's some kind of atrocity, it's a first-person account with someone that was actually there. It's not an interpretation; it's not what someone else thought that person thought, it's what that person thought. So I think that has the ability to take you into the minds of and see some of that stuff through a better perspective. And the more you— the more different perspectives you can get other than your own, the better you're going to understand things.

Yeah, yeah. I've been blown away by, like, I mean, the likes the podcast has when you started off as... I don't know if he's gonna be able to find 50 books.

And now well, I thought that too because when I started, there was a few books, you know, about “Faced” by Hackworth. There was three or four books that I knew I could cover that really had a big impact on me. And then I reached a little bit and I said, “We know I can do this one too.” And when I started reading with the thought that what can I learn from this—not just what do I understand about it; what can I actually learn from this? Then I started pulling out all these old books that I had read with the old breed, just books that are incredible books. And as I pulled those out and now I realize the actual problem isn’t that there aren't enough books; the actual problem is that there’s no possible way I can cover all the books that exist that we can learn from and that I can learn from. So the problem ended up not being the problem my father initially was; there are a lot of incredible books out there.

Yeah, well you’re doing a great job. Mike, what's your story?

Much along the same lines. First off, thanks for having me on. Y Combinator's dear to my heart because I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. Much like Jack, I did something uncharacteristic to a kid coming out of Atherton, California: I enlisted in the Marine Corps and then eventually became a SEAL. And you know— finished up and retired after 20 years. I was one of Jacko's guys, you know, in the book “Extreme Ownership.” It’s all about the Battle of Ramadi. I wasn’t one of those guys; I worked for Jocko and hence how we’ve known each other for so long. You know I did not write a book because I believe in extreme ownership; we can't replicate what is already working. But really, you know, I finished my MBA at the University of Texas right before I retired and I just got into facilitating successful veteran transitions.

And when I say “successful,” a lot of the time that is not setting the expectation on the corporate side; that is actually setting the expectation side or setting the expectations on the veteran side and getting their heads right. It’s not an easy thing to hear after 20 years in the military that you are a new guy again, but you are—we may have some great leadership tenets and foundational aspects of leadership, but when you step into a different industry, you step into a different industry and it takes time. You've got to roll your sleeves up; you’ve got to get to work and you’ve got to prove your worth.

Mm-hmm. And so sometimes that’s a lot tougher for veterans than the general public may know.

Mm-hmm. And I mean that's really at the core of what we were going to talk about today. So how does the process go for both of you? I mean Mike, you got red and going while you were still active, right?

I did. I still don’t know if that was the right decision. You know, when you’re not coming from a totally stable financial position, you're still active duty starting a company, even though this was a social venture, the timing might not have been right. But in retrospect, it is an organization that's gonna do a lot of good for veterans.

And so, you know, I focused my MBA and let me say that's when I stepped into the MBA program, I thought I was going to do investment banking and I realized really quickly that that did not play to my strengths and that I like to create things in front of me and I like to see the value proposition as I stand it up. And quickly transitioned to focusing because there were a lot of teammates calling me that were like, “Mike, did we know you have connections in Silicon Valley? Can you help me get a job?” And I’m like, “What is going on here?” I'm like, “These are jock, who knows a lot of these?” yet these guys are amazing, amazing leaders. So what is the major disconnect? And that's, you know, when I got Admiral McRaven involved and we discussed the systemic challenges facing veterans and really started the foundation of what Vetted came from, which was a research project into those challenges facing veterans.

And then the “so what, how do we solve it?”

Mm-hmm. And that's when we got Wharton, UT McCombs, and Texas A&M—Business School involved and hence we created what Huffington Post has called the most comprehensive veteran transition program in the nation.

And now you guys are starting it here to some extent.

So yes. We basically did the social side and Jocko and Lafe have been involved in Vetted and now it’s all those lessons learned from standing that up and we're capitalizing it and, you know, we live in a capitalistic society; we can do a lot more good on the for-profit side than we can on the nonprofit side, right? We didn't want to let those valuable lessons from standing this thing up just go to waste when we knew we could actually shake a lot more cages and rattle things loose in the for-profit room. Because, Jocko, your story when you transitioned out, is that when Echelon Front began or did you think about finding a job somewhere?

So about six months before I retired, and my last job in the Navy was running the training for the West Coast SEAL teams. Really what I was doing was simulating combat and then putting leaders through leadership training; that's what it was. And so about six months prior to retiring, a guy that I knew asked me to come and talk to his executive team about combat leadership, and I thought, you know, okay cool I'll go do that. And he said, “I’ll give you some money,” and I said, “Well that’s makes it even a little bit cooler,” so I went up and I talked.

And I don't know what he expected me to talk about, but whatever I do, you know, I basically gave the same brief that I would give the young junior officers when they were entering the SEAL teams when they had graduated the basic SEAL training. I would give them a brief and I basically gave that same leadership brief to these executives. And when I got done, the CEO came up to me and said, “Hey I want you to do this for every division of my company.” And I said, “Well, you know, I'm retiring in six months and I'm not really looking to do anything like that.” And he says, “I’ll give you money.” And I said, “Well, okay, let’s talk about that then.”

And so then he ended up paying me and at one of those divisional meetings, the CEO of the parent company was there. And when I got done, the CEO of the parent company came up to me and he said, “Hey, I want you to do this for all my CEOs. I want you to come talk to all my CEOs.” And they owned 45 or 50 companies at the time, so I did an event with 45 or 50 CEOs and got done with that and a bunch of those CEOs came up and said to me, “Hey, can you come and talk to my company?” And that was where it started. It didn’t take very long for me to be signed up with work. And at the same time, Lafe, who wrote the book with me and who was also in Ramadi and who’s my dear friend and brother—he had—he was still in the Navy and he had met with a company that had come to do like a tour of the SEAL team and they kind of were interested as well. And he kind of talked about leadership with them, and as soon as he was getting ready to get out—he got out after 13 years, I think— I said, “Hey man, I need some fire support over here.” And so that’s where it started.

And then, like you said, you know, as we would go out and work with these companies, they’d say, “Hey, do you have these—you guys have this stuff written down anywhere? Do you have a document you can give us or a manual you can give us?” And eventually we wrote, we wrote that stuff down more specifically and that’s what turned into the book.

Okay, so I think we should explain like basically how the transition process works from, I mean, the SEALs of the Navy more broadly because I didn’t fully understand the amount of training or the lack of amount of training that you got, so I think most of our listeners don’t know either. So could you walk through what you get?

So you know, you announce you’re retiring, what happens?

I don’t think I'm really a great example; I think Mike could be better because I told my chain of command that I was retiring, you know, and I had great relationships up my chain of command, and it was a whole very hard decision to make. But I told him I was retiring and then I finished out my work and then I went to the—there's a class called TAP, Transition, I didn’t even go to that. I went to zero. So I didn’t do anything, and I wouldn’t recommend that. There’s a lot of good information by the time I was retiring.

I was pretty much just good to go and on another path moving down this road and didn't need to do anything else. What I needed to do was go forward and continue to work with civilian leaders and expand working with more companies, so that's what I did. I'm not a great example of how to set yourself up for retirement or how the Navy transitions you for retirement.

Yeah, I could actually provide us some context for that. So, you know, for your average invite—when I mean average, it’s not average in Townsville—when your general soldier, airman, sailor, marine, when you make the decision to get out, you know, the military starts you on the process. Unfortunately, you’re pretty much focused on your work almost up to the day you get out; that's just how the military is raised. Because you want to do such a good job and you want to pass off a good product to whoever’s coming behind you to ensure their success. That's what vets do.

And so you focus very little on your actual transition and then all of a sudden you get an exiting document from the military and you’re like what do I do now? So the military does a really good job of training people on the front end. I mean for the SEAL community, we'll use that as an example, I mean you go through basically two years training before you even show up to a SEAL team, you know, very specifically how to do your job. You know the science of it. And of course, over the course of your SEAL career, you hone the art. The military doesn’t do a great job of transitioning people out and preparing them for success; what they did was outsource the process to the Department of Labor, hence this Transition Assistance Program called TAP.

It's a one-week course. And even though TAPs are run by awesome, awesome Americans, this is the way I put it: we have people in the Department of Labor running those programs that have very little private sector time themselves—they’re federal government employees. So federal government employees should not be preparing veterans for jobs in the private sector.

And that’s why we stood up Vetted. And TAPs is basically a cursory program that covers, you know, all your VA benefits. Here are some sources for how to do a resume. This is how you should interview. But it’s very quick. And the Department of Labor does very well with the problems that they were handed. Just as a whole, we’re under-serving our veterans in preparing them for successful transitions.

And that's why we need to rely more on the private sector to get involved and actually solve it for the government. At the end of the day, the military needs to focus on what's important: that is winning wars. If we want the military to get good at transitioning veterans out, that draws resources from elsewhere, which means we’re sending less prepared soldiers, airmen, Marines, and sailors overseas to face the threats that they have to face.

So again, you know, if people think well the military should do a better job of this, it’s not all on the military. I know the military has their job, their real job, which is to defend this country and to take focus away from that just—it’s not the right thing to do.

Right, so you're stepping in and trying to solve this mismatch of education, right, between the private market and military. And so what does the current program look like for you guys?

So we—you know, the name of the company that we unveil in July is Echelon Front Overwatch. We call it Overwatch for short. Again, it’s very niche. It’s a white glove premium service. We focus specifically on the special operations forces: that is your Green Berets, your Navy SEALs, your MARSOC Raiders, Air Force PJs, Pararescuemen, CCT, and then combat aviators. So we had to start with a small group, nail that market, and then maybe we can expand down the road to all veterans because we're not saying that SOF and combat aviators are the only ones that are gonna be successful in the private sector. And there are a lot of cases that actually defy that.

So we focus on those groups. We do a lot of preparation on the front side preparing our candidates. One, the vetting process—Jocko and I are gonna tell you like our industry in the military is much like any industry. You have high performers, those middle road performers, and the substandard performers. Echelon Front Overwatch will not place anyone that is substandard in any company because we at the end of the day are concerned about our credibility in the private sector. So we put a lot of diligence into preparing and vetting the candidates that we present to our clients.

Now we are industry agnostic; it could be investment banking, it could be tech, it could be healthcare, you know, ultimately, that's know or think they know what they want to do when they get out. So that's why we'll place in in any industry. But we do have a thorough process to vet them and prepare them and we do put a lot of the work on veterans. You know our Golden Rule on the website is no one will own your transition for you, not even us. We should—you have to own this. We are not going to, you know, completely do your resume for you; we will revise it.

But if you’re not willing to roll your sleeves up, especially here’s the key—not willing to be humble and not willing to work hard, then this is not for you. And so every candidate we produce is going to be one established leader in the military who is humble, is ready to work, they’re ready to listen to somebody in that industry, and learn the tools of the trade and then apply to leadership they learn in the military to succeed.

Mm-hmm. And are you applying any particular educational regimen for them?

We are. So, you know, actually I'm pretty proud of the career resources page on Echelon Front Overwatch. If you go to efowatch.com under the career resources tab, we laid out a six-step process for veterans to follow, and it starts with know thyself: a lot of personal assessments, you know. We always talk about brutal self-assessments to know your strengths, know your weaknesses, specifically to play to your strengths and know how to augment your weaknesses.

And then it goes from there of re-educating yourself, one, doing a lot of career industry and research to identify if a certain industry or company is the right fit—that's on them—and then education and retraining. There's a lot of great programs out there: Vetted, the Venture and Accelerated Management Program, Stanford Ignite, right in your backyard, Dartmouth Next Step, Bethany Coates with Brake Line. I mean there are a lot of great programs; don't go through one of them; go through as many as you can.

And the one thing you know about vets is we do lack a business acumen. We come from a different industry where we have a completely set of tools. Yeah, and if I took a CEO from a tech company in Silicon Valley, they would be blown away watching us go through the military decision-making process and how diligent it is. So for vets, they have to learn the hard skills in the new industry they're stepping into.

And that's one of the things when working with clients, and we place a candidate into that company is we lay out all the steps they need to sort of retrain themselves to learn those tools. So if they’re stepping into digital marketing, we’re gonna, you know, lay out a number of digital marketing courses that they can take when they step into the job. So there’s on-the-job training.

And again, that Overwatch phase of maintaining contact with the candidate and client, the one thing—and simply learn in your backyard in August—we are unveiling the Corporate Skills Apprenticeship Program for veterans and simply learn in Echelon Front Overwatch are spearheading this. It'll include digital marketing, digital selling, PMP, Lean Six Sigma so process improvement, Agile, and then also business analyst certifications.

It is tough; it is long, but we got a great discount for veterans, and if someone goes through the other program, there is no doubt that they're starting salary with all those certifications will go up. It's just—hey, here's the thing. You have to be willing to sit down and do the work and get through that Corporate Skills Apprenticeship Program. But it's worthwhile, so we're happy about that.

Yeah, I mean I can imagine it’s tough if guys are coming out of what—4D? When did you guys get out?

Yeah, I was 38.

Yeah, you were 38. Yeah, no kidding. I was, uh, well I enlisted when I was 18. Yeah, I was 19 when I enlisted; I got out of it actually, no, I was a—I was 39; I just turned 39 because I did a little bit over 20 years.

Okay, got it. Yeah, I do. So, I got out at 40; enlisted when I was 19. But, I mean, we have veterans getting out at all stages: there are guys in their younger 20s that just do, you know, four to six years, and then guys that do more than us getting out in their 50s, right?

And guess what? They want to get after it in the private sector.

Oh yeah, I’m sure. I mean they have a whole life ahead of them.

Yeah, and the thing is, as Mike was talking about, like, sure there’s skills that you have to learn for these specific industries, and quite honestly that’s the easy part. Like, if you blow it off, it’ll crush you. But if you are attentive to it and you address it, you'll get those skills. But the hard part that people need and what makes this program great is that you've got people that have experienced in leadership and experience leading other human beings to accomplish very challenging missions over short periods of time and over long periods of time.

And that is what is challenging. And it’s much harder to train someone to be a leader than it is to train someone about some technical aspect of a job or even the background of a job. It takes much more time; it takes years, it takes dozens of years, and that's what we've got in this situation.

We've got people that have not only learned those leadership skills, they've applied those leadership skills over and over again in high-stress environments. There's no better way we could prepare people for leadership in the civilian sector than have them serve in the military and be in leadership positions.

And then you take them out, you polish them up with the industry knowledge, which, again, hey, I'm not taking anything away from the industry knowledge; it's important and it's hard to learn. But the level that a leader needs to learn it isn’t the same level that the ground troop needs to know it. So they acquire the skill set and then they apply what they've got from the military and what they've got them from their leadership experience, and you've got a winner right there.

Yeah, well times Mike said before, you know, it’s this practiced experience as compared to an MBA which is what—to you, I mean, like two months into your MBA you’re looking for your internship, which hopefully is your next job?

Yeah, I agree with you. The thing about leadership in, you know, the executive development industry is the year-over-year growth is amazing because companies realize they have to train their internal talent; they have to build talent from within.

Is that, you know, at the end of the day, the US military—and we talked about this before—is the preeminent leadership training platform in the world because we have the resources and the time to do it. I mean if you step into the military, whether you enlist or you're an officer, you're going through an initial three-month, 24/7 restructuring program, the training program to get you ready for the rigors of the military in one to lead and, you know, officer candidate school and in boot camp.

So that, I mean there’s a methodology to the design, and we talked about this yesterday, you know, the Marine Corps is probably the best at putting people through Marine boot camp, turning young girls and boys into men and women, and it’s amazing that process has just not been replicated by anyone.

Yeah, yeah, and it’s the whole thing with leadership is that it takes time; it takes time to develop those skills. And the other thing is, it’s hard; it’s hard to do, and you’ve got all these crazy people that work for you, you know, regardless of what situation you’re in.

You know, that's one thing—one of the myths about the military is that everyone in the military is just—they're like robots, and they’ll just listen to what everyone says. Well, the fact that matter is that’s not true. And even inside the SEAL Teams, I don’t think so. These guys are just so motivated, they'll do whatever you say. That’s completely untrue.

The guys in the SEAL Teams, you’ve got all kinds of, just like any other group of people: you’ve got egos, you’ve got personalities, you’ve got different motivations that are driving people. You’ve got people that get wrapped around their own plan that they come up with, and they don’t want to listen to anyone else. Or you have to work through all those problems.

So people that have experience doing that over time, you can’t buy that experience; you can’t go to school for that experience. And even the fact that the military takes people and puts you through leadership training, that right there alone isn’t enough. What really makes the people in the military become good leaders is that they lead—they lead and may succeed sometimes and they fail sometimes. And if they go through their career, they learn from those failures and they become better and they don’t make those mistakes again. And by the time they’re getting ready to move on, they know what they're doing.

Mm-hmm. So I think many people are actually given the success of your podcast think that when someone comes out of the SEAL—oh, sorry—oh, it’s a Jocko—oh, it’s a Mike—like, oh, we just got one of those guys, but that’s not always the case. And I think because, so as a percentage of the population so few people know any of these elite members of the service, there are these preconceptions that people get in their head, and I think now’s a good time to just like dispel those and honestly, like explain what people are expecting. So when you guys are talking to an employer, what are you coaching them with? How are you instructing them to like this is what’s reality and this is what you may think? What comes up?

Well, you got individuals first of all and just like—just like any group of people—it's a bell curve, right? And just like Mike just talked about, you’ve got people too high under the bell curve; you’ve got people too low end of the bell curve and you’ve got a bunch of people in the middle of the bell curve. And our job before we place someone is to make sure that they’re at the high end of the bell curve.

Mm-hmm. Because there’s your hundred percent, right? And we’ll talk about SEALs, for example, as far as someone that’s in the civilian sector, a SEAL is a SEAL is a SEAL is a SEAL. If you were in the SEAL Teams, you’re good to go, you’re just a perfect leader and you’re a great—you’ve got a great way to deal with stress and you can overcome all these problems. It's like that’s actually not true.

There are a lot of great guys in the SEAL Teams and there are some spectacular individuals in the SEAL Teams, and there’s also guys—there's a bunch of people down the middle that do their job and they do a great job, and then there's people on the low end of the spectrum that they don’t do a good job and they managed to stay in. Then it’s true with the Marine Corps, true with the Army, it's true with Special Forces, true with everyone; every group has their bottom feeders in there.

And so what we do is make sure that none of those bottom feeders get placed by us because it’s very hard for a civilian to tell the difference between—You know I always ask employers, “Have you ever interviewed somebody and you thought, ‘I am about to hire the biggest stud who’s gonna crush this and I’m set for life because I got this guy coming by team or this girl coming on my team,’ and then how often does that person turn out to be horrible?”

Mm-hmm. You know, okay, let’s say you’re pretty good; even if you’re pretty good at judging those situations, you’re still probably only batting like 70 or 80 percent at best. Twenty percent of the time you’re hiring someone that is a disaster. People learn to interview well; some people can interview very well; some people are great workers but they interview horribly, and you can’t tell from looking at the resume when you shouldn’t talk to me.

I don't see this guy, this guy or girl working out. So it’s the same thing with the SEAL Teams; it’s the same thing with any group—any group. And so what we're doing is taking a look at these people, we're vetting them, and we're making sure that we're screening them properly and know and understand their reputation through our connections and then train them and test them and make sure that they are on board and think the way we think and are gonna be a good fit for replacement.

Yeah, I think Jocko pretty much summarized that pretty well. We do get a lot of preconceived notions; naturally, people's perceptions of the military come out of the books, okay, in the movies—primarily the movies. And so, you know, a lot of people will think we just run around the bases singing cadences 24/7, carrying logs all day. It's not the case; these guys are personally authentic, they're usually of high emotional intelligence, they're highly capable, they have a character, they have the aptitude, and if they don’t, even within our respective communities—again we’re using the SEAL community—we tend to minimize those bottom feeders, as Jocko referred to them.

If they are bipolar and just have low emotional intelligence, we’re gonna let go, okay? Yes, we’re gonna shift you over to this job here because you know you can do this job well and it's not on the front line and it won’t have any major consequences. If I mean, that happens within our community as well, but we know, and here’s the great thing about the Special Operations community and the combat aviators, is we can reach back to our respective colleagues that are still in the community and say, “Hey, John Doe, thumbs up, thumbs down?”

Oh yeah, absolutely comes up or hey, your thumbs down, here's why. And we can validate, you know, that pretty quickly. So at the end of the day, you know, I tell a lot of employers like, “Hey, we don’t even charge a retainer like a lot of recruiting firms; we just want promised interviews. So if a company comes to us, we’re not gonna charge it for a retainer fee; just give us three promised interviews and we want the dates and times and we’ll put our candidates in front of you.” And then they impress them like, “Oh wow, totally demystified what I thought about veterans.”

Yeah, we know; we know. And that changes a lot of perceptions; you just got to talk to them and you recognize, “Hey, these are people too.” So for those who aren't fortunate enough to work with you guys, do you have some advice for companies interviewing veterans or looking to interview veterans?

This is a question that comes up all the time; it comes up from every company I work with, and it came up in the SEAL Teams, and you’ve probably heard me talk about this. It’s like, guess what? It’s really hard to judge people. It’s really hard to judge people; it’s really hard to judge a book by a cover. And you, you know, I was in—you watch people going to the Basic SEAL Training Course and you look at a group of ten people and you’re not gonna know who’s gonna make it through, who’s not gonna make it through—that's the way it is. The only way to figure out who’s gonna make it through is to put them through it.

Yeah, that’s the only way. Now, so what I’d recommend companies all the time is when you—you know, yes, you want to do a thorough interview, yes, you want to give them scenarios, yes, you want to put some pressure on them and figure out where they’re coming from. But what you really want to do is say, “Look, we’re gonna bring you on as a contractor for 90 days and see what you’re like. See what you’re like and see if you can really do what it is you say you can do and see if you’re gonna lose your temper and see if you’re gonna get crazy on some minute thing that doesn’t really matter and see if you’re gonna work hard.”

Like all those things are things that you need to explore when you’re dealing with a hiring situation.

Yeah, so like standard best practices.

Yeah, stratum like anyone else. Standard best practices. Gold standard. Precious. I mean you could—the only thing I’d say is when you do have a veteran and/or you’re looking to hire a veteran, again going back to the technical skills that they may or may not have, that’s okay. Take a look at the technical skills and say, “You know, what are they in the ballpark, and can we give them a little bit of leniency because we know that they've got some experience and some leadership skills that we can bring to the table?”

So all those are all those are good things. One of the services that it’s worth mentioning that you know, basically this test drive before you make a final offer. We actually will work with companies to set up a veteran fellowship for recently separated veterans, so they get this great veteran for anywhere from six months to 12 years at an industry standard salary as a fellowship, hooking in there.

And then they get to make that final determination at the end of the six months or 12 months of “yes, this is a good candidate for this company.” We want to make a final offer, and then what it allows veterans to do as well is to, you know, the all tourism of the side of the company is you're giving them great industry experience where they can come back to us and we can find another company that is a right culture fit. So it really benefits both parties greatly.

Let’s go a little bit broader. So Jocko, you've been on a warpath writing in the past couple years. Sure. I’m curious about the next book. So “Dichotomy of Leadership.”

Dichotomy in Leadership. This is another one I’m writing with—we actually wrote—it's worth Lafe once again and the title is “Dichotomy Leadership.” And so as—which is actually chapter 12 in “Extreme Ownership” is called the dichotomy leadership. And the reason for that is the reason that we ended up writing a whole book about it now is as we work with companies over the past years and we look and see what problems were they having, where were the issues that they were having, it was always trying to find this balance in the various dichotomies of leadership, of which there is I think an infinite number.

So for instance, as a leader, if you go too far in one direction, you become a micromanager. Hmm. And now your people lose any initiative and they stop taking charge of things and they stop moving forward without your permission. So you’re micromanaging them too much and that’s bad. You go too far in the other direction where now they don’t even know what your strategy is, you don’t communicate with them enough, they don’t know which direction they’re supposed to be heading, and they’re all kind of wandering around—that’s bad. So what you have to do is you have to balance those two.

Is it possible for a leader to be too close to your people where all of a sudden you develop these close relationships where they stop listening to you because now you become more of a friend than a leader? Or is it possible to—so that’s bad, or you go too far in the other direction where you don't know who anyone is and you don’t know what their what’s going on with their family life and you can’t relate to them at all? Well then that’s bad as well.

So there’s all these dichotomies that you as a leader have to balance, and it's the hardest thing to do as a leader because the reason is because both answers are right. Both—it like, is it right to be close to your people? Yeah, absolutely, so you should be close to them. But is it right to like have enough distance that they still—it yes, that’s right too.

So that every direction is the right answer, but what you have to do is balance them. And so that’s why we wrote this entire book about many of these dichotomies that exist. And then once you recognize that there are dichotomies, then you can start seeing them in everything, you know. There’s ones that we didn’t write in the book that, you know, we still tweet, we mentioned in the book; we didn’t write whole chapters about them, but you know, is it possible to be too direct in communicating with someone? Well yes, it is because you can be offensive to them. Is it possible to not be direct enough? Yes, it is because now they don't really understand what it is you want.

Yeah, so these dichotomies exist everywhere as a leader and that’s why we ended up—and as we dealt with companies and we saw where the friction points were, it was always because they were getting off; they were losing the balance in various categories of leadership, and that’s why we wrote the whole book about it. What are the dichotomies you deal with and managing each other and working together, you know, in all of us, weren't you too?

Well, I would say that the biggest thing for me is, you know, I'm pretty hands-off, you know, and I give intent on how things are supposed to go and Mike is too, so I lean towards being a little bit too hands-off; Mike leans towards being a little bit too aggressive. And so it's the—it’s fine but occasionally I look up and I see where Mike is not like, “Hey Mike, come back,” and that’s the way it is.

But, you know, I mean we've been working together for a long time, and you’ve known each other for a long time, and and that’s the way the whole our whole company of Echelon Front; it's all, you know, it’s all that’s the way we operate. We know each other very well; it makes it easier that we don’t have to build relationships, that relationships are already there. We already know—we already know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and whether it’s strengths and weaknesses or just like I know Mike’s gonna be aggressive. I know if I put Mike in a room with, you know, like a shovel and a match, I’m gonna come back two weeks later and he’s gonna have like dug to the—you know, through the ground and built a fire and we’re creating some business around whatever, right?

That’s what’s gonna happen, and that’s fine; so I just need to be aware of that, and then he knows me; like he knows me—I’ll be like, yeah, I’ll go get some good, go, and then occasionally he goes, oh, you know what? I should probably tell Joe that I’m about to make this major move right now. Yeah, whatever. And so—and it’s the same thing, you know, throughout the whole crew.

So Mike, I’m curious about your answer, but I have another question for you because this is how it works with most startups. So, alright, you and Lafe start a show on front, right? And then you hire like one buddy, and then you hire two buddies, and before you know it, like you’re at ten and you’ve maybe run out of buddies you want to hire. How do what happens if Echelon Front goes to a hundred people? Or will you cap it before that happens?

We won’t cap it; we’ll hire the right people. That’s what we’ll do; we’ll hire the right people. And most importantly—well, there’s a bunch of things that are equally important. Number one, we’ll hire the right people.

Number two, when people come on board before they come on board, we’ll make sure that they understand where we're coming from. Once they’re on board, we’ll make it really, really clear how we roll, right? Okay, how we roll. How do they say that in the business world? They say, our culture, right? They say this is our culture; like that’s how you’d say it. I’d say like this is how we roll. This is who we are.

Yeah, this is what we do. And when people get on board and they recognize that this is not a game, this is actually what we do and this is how we roll, then people will either get on board with the program or they won’t. People that don’t get on board with the program, that's okay, I don’t dislike people that don’t get on board with the program, but I'm not gonna work with them. I’m not gonna work with them.

There’s plenty of people out there that want to work hard and want to get after it. There’s plenty of people out there; there’s also plenty of people that don’t, and that's okay. We’ll bring people on board that want to get after it, right?

Well, there’s also different styles of getting after it.

Okay, explain those to me.

Well I mean it's okay, so I often break it down into personality types, right? So I'm generally maybe skewing towards Mike's direction in terms like really getting into something and then putting my head down and just doing it. So low, and I generally don't require input from other people. Once I know it’s like, alright, this is what’s happening, I’m doing it. I prefer to work alone on this project and I can get this done.

Sure, yeah, you’re right. Other people need to be affirmed the whole way and those styles don’t necessarily align perfectly if you build that whole team.

Yeah, you’re gonna end up with different types of people on every team. Just like I said earlier, so—and you are right; I didn’t really understand what you were saying, but yeah, there’s people that move forward in different ways and there’s some people. And that’s one thing like for instance with span of control, right? It’s like, you know, there’s a number for span of control in combat it’s four or five people. In the business world, it’s seven or eight people, generally. Those are the numbers that get thrown around.

However, if you’re in control or if you’re running a team and everyone on the team is a player, guess what? You can control more of them because you don’t have to give them a correct much direction. If you have a bunch of substandard players on your team and guess what? They’re gonna need more direction.

Guess what? In your average team, some of them are—it’s a bell curve. And so there’s some people you don’t have to give much attention to; you’re a guy that puts Craig in and gets this project down, you're gonna get this project done, you put your head down, you’re gonna get after it, and I know it’s taken care of.

Bill over here—Oh Bill, can you get this project done? Well, yeah, okay, and I know that bill is gonna need a little follow-up, nothing major, but I’m gonna have to give him a little pat on the back, a little nudge to make sure he’s getting his job back.

Yeah, absolutely. You have to modulate your leadership depending on the people you're dealing with. Now, this doesn’t mean that you change your personality; this doesn't mean you're a different human being; it doesn’t mean you’re two-faced in any sense. But you have to modulate your interaction with different people depending on the type of person that you’re dealing with.

I think that's, in my experience, that’s been one of the hardest leadership problems, like—not problems or challenges—like just getting used to dealing with different types of people and recognizing that like I'm in a heads-down mode right now, but Jocko needs a lot of help right now. And unfortunately, I have to give them time.

And again, that’s one of the best things about what we’re doing now is bringing people that have dealt with all these Scituate and dealt with all these different types of people, and they have learned to recognize these things. And so now we give them some technical skills, we get them out in the field, and they’re in the crusher. Man, I'm gonna have to compete with these guys!

Alright Mike, what are the dichotomies that you think you deal with with Jocko?

I want to go back to it—you know, this is easy here in Jocko. Alluded to it, we've built trust and credibility in Jocko's eyes since 2006.

So what I view as LAN Front is basically Task Unit Bruiser from the Battle of Ramadi rebranded. So when you just talked about it—who we are and how we roll him when Jocko MAIF came to me, they’re like, onboarding, it's like okay, I already know who we are and how we roll. And I mean they threw me into the next pretty quick— I did one event without Jocko, one event with Lafe and they’re like, go forth now and perform it with Jocko.

And, you know, Jocko was, again, the tasking and commander to us all, member to us all. It’s easy, and you know with Jocko, it’s one thing: perform, do your job and do well. I know you have the capability to do it and utilize the principles of extreme ownership and the laws of combat, and you will succeed. It doesn’t mean—we will fail here and there, but the great thing about like Jocko and Tasking Bruiser, there was no zero defect mentality, as I like to call it.

We are not perfect, we are flawed like every other human, we will fail, and then we will sit down and we’ll learn from it so that we never make that mistake again. And one of the best—the best military unit I ever worked for, bar none, was Task Unit Bruiser.

And I never saw a level of humility within the military by Tasking and Preserver ever again. So, and that was really my military career when I was eight years into the military at that point.

Yeah, and that's one thing I did want to bring up a little bit was when we were talking earlier about screening people, right? And basically I was saying like, “Hey, we’re gonna screen people and make sure that they’re on board.” It makes me sound like I’m sitting here saying we’re the judge of everyone that’s in the military. That's absolutely not true.

And there’s plenty—there’s there are so many people in the military that are far superior in every skill set that I’ve ever had, even at my absolute prime. We—there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of people that are far superior to me in every way, and I’m stoked that I will have the opportunity to give those people out to companies where they will go and crush it. Because believe me, on the same—in the civilian sector, I meet leaders all the time in the civilian sector that are unbelievably awesome leaders, and guess what they want? They want more good people.

They want more good people. So for me to have this opportunity, really not as a judge, and I apologize for coming off like “Hey, I’m judging or we’re judging,” and like, “No, actually we’re looking for people that are better than us.”

And I know him; I know him. I know people that are better than all of us, and those are the people we’re gonna bring and turn them loose with these companies, again, with companies in the civilian sector that are incredible, incredible companies with incredible leadership that want more good people.

And you know what? There are companies in the civilian sector that maybe they have some leadership issues, and this is something that I saw a lot when I was running training. You have a SEAL platoon or you give us SEAL task unit. When I first started running the training, I wanted the platoon commander and the platoon chief to be the leaders. I was like, “These guys,” and if they weren't the leaders, I’d I thought it was wrong.

And it didn’t take me long to be; it didn't take me long to get to a point where, “Oh, it’s hard to find good leaders.” So if I have two good leaders in a platoon, and to have them actually be the platoon commander and the platoon chief was actually very, very rare. And I realized that it didn’t matter that much; it was optimal, but what I really wanted was a couple really solid leaders in the team.

I didn’t care where they were in the team; they could be the lowest ranking guy, they could be in the middle somewhere; they needed to be good solid leadership.

And if you had one or two—if you had two really—you need two good leaders. If you had two good leaders and a SEAL platoon, the SEAL platoon was gonna do awesome. And it didn’t matter where they were; if they happened to be the platoon commander, great. If it happened to be the platoon chief, great. If it happened to be the leading petty officer, great. That was super.

If it happened to be an E5 that had done two deployments to Afghanistan or Iraq and had a lot of experience and had stepped up and got after it and was a good leader, he would make things happen, yeah? And he would do it in such a way where he wasn’t stepping on people’s toes, but he would still get the respect of the boys.

It was awesome to see. And so when we go to companies now, like people always say, “Well, the CEO is messed up or my leader’s messed up.” It’s a “That’s okay, you’re gonna work for people that aren’t necessarily the best leaders in the world.” That’s fine.

People ask me what do you do when you have a weak leader? I’m like, I’m happy if my leader’s weak! I’m stoked; I’m going, “Hey boss, you know I got this. Hey, thanks for your support; we’re gonna keep over—we’re gonna keep, we’re gonna be over here doing what we do. I’ll let you know if we need anything; we really appreciate it. Here’s the credit on the last things we did; here you take it, go make yourself look great.” That’s what I’m here for, and you build that relationship and you go get the mission done.

Yeah, that’s what you do. So again, I just want to make sure that I’m not sounding like I’m the supreme judges of the world because we're absolutely not. We do happen to be lucky enough to have contacts in the military community and now contacts in the civilian community, and we just want to help those two great groups of people get together and kick ass.

Man, I think it's so great howdy. How do you recommend that companies set up their structure such that, you know, the intern that just started, if they have a great idea, let’s ship it, it’s happening. Do you have advice on that?

Yeah, it’s called decentralized command; it’s called humility, right? So, decentralized schematic stream ownership has the fundamental concept of “Hey, we’re gonna—Listen up and down the chain of command, we’re gonna let our frontline people who knows better.”

If Mike’s in the field with his platoon and I’m back in the Forward Operating Base somewhere and he needs to make a decision, who knows to make a better decision? It mirrors at him; it's him. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, there’s that small percentage of the time where I happen to know because I'm in a further away position that there's enemy men moving in or that there’s a support element coming to him and I can say, “Mike, don’t go west; hold what you got, there’s a support element coming your direction right now.” And he goes okay, thank you.

And, and so, but most of the time he’s in the field and he says, “Hey, this is what I see—this is what I’m gonna do.” And I say, “Awesome, do it. Let me know how we can support you or here’s some elements I’m gonna move to support you.” So that’s decentralized command.

The biggest hindrance to decentralized command is ego—ego is me going, “You shut up Mike and do what I tell you to do; you don’t know what you’re doing; you’re junior to me; you haven’t been as long as me; you’ve been as long as me; you need to listen to me.”

Yeah, no, actually I’m stoked when one of my subordinate leaders comes up with a great plan that makes me that makes me eminently happy because now I can say, “Oh Mike, that’s a great plan; you know what, I couldn’t come up with that plan. You run and execute it now. Who has ownership of that plan? It’s all Mike, and he’s gonna run with that plan, he’s gonna make it work, he’s gonna overcome any obstacles.

That’s what’s gonna happen. Why? Because he created the plan; it’s his plan as opposed to me dictating a plan to him and saying this is the way you will do it; you won’t deviate from what I’ve told you to do. Well then what's he gonna do when he gets out in the field and hits an obstacle? He’s gonna go, oh you know what, Jocko's plan’s sucking; we’re not gonna go that way.

You know, you set up a culture like that where even the new guy—yeah, where his or her opinion matters, then you set up a culture for success. And I’ll tell you why.

And I’m gonna refer back to the Task Unit Bruiser—they set up front that, “Hey even if you’re a new guy, you lead. And if everyone’s leading, we win.” And then you fast forward through that one year of training that we had leading up to the Battle of Ramadi, the new guys on their first deployment within Task Unit Bruiser were some of the high-performing individuals within that Task Unit. I mean, the accolades that came out of it, you know, unfortunately, we lost some new guys: Michael Monsoor who made the most selfless sacrifice by jumping on a grenade to save three other SEALs—brand new guy, Ryan Jobe laying down cover fire for his team to move—brand new guy, Mark Lee, you know, killed during a firefight, again covering his brothers.

And then, you know, I can say it, John and Kim, because he’s, you know, in the public eye, up with Johnny Kim now, a NASA astronaut, was a brand new guy who was awarded the Silver Star during that deployment. Why? Because they set the culture upfront that, “Lead, speak up and leap; we’re listening.” No doubt about it.

And if you think that me, okay, because I was in charge of Tasking your prisoner, if you think that I can sit there in any combat situation and control like a puppet master the elements that are out on the battlefield, it’s just—it’s literally impossible to.

I don’t care who you are; I don’t care how good you are, you don’t have the cognitive capacity to do that. And it happens in businesses. And again, this is—did we see this all the time in businesses? As the businesses grow—you talked about going from ten people to hundred people—well, if you've got a CEO that’s a good solid leader and he likes to control things with—and people, he can pull it off for sure with ten people.

He can pull it off; he’s a workaholic, he’s working 22 hours a day, 20 hours a day, 18 hours a day, he’s in every meeting. He can pull that off. When he gets 200 people, he can’t pull that off anymore. It’s physically, humanly, and cognitively impossible to do that.

So if he hasn't set up the culture strong enough, that people understand how they’re supposed to operate, then they’re not going to operate properly. So, you know, that’s real commander's intent, and it is its culture. Commander’s intent is—or a culture is almost like a broad commander’s intent that overlays the entire group of individuals that you work with.

Everybody knows; everybody knows this is what—we’re moving towards, right?

So with this new book, are you referencing stories from Echelon Front? Because I've kind of been wondering if the podcast is now gonna create a feedback loop. So you're—maybe not this book; but maybe the next book is actually not even your stories but it's stories from Vietnam, World War II?

So the the next book, “Dichotomy of Leadership,” is still stories from our military career from our combat experiences and from the training that we went through. And it also still includes stories from Echelon Front—from all the companies that we’ve worked with down the line.

Yeah, there will be other books that address other things—lessons that I’ve learned from the podcast.

Yeah, so I've got that book probably coming out about a year after this one. So I’ve already done that deal.

Yeah, dude!

Yeah, how many hours a day do you write?

I write—I try write an hour a day. When it’s on, I write about a thousand words an hour. And I sit down and write for now, and I got a thousand words. So you know for the kids’ book they’re about twenty-five or thirty thousand words. So that's—that's 30 days, 25 or 30 days worth of writing a thousand words that you keep every day.

Yeah, I do pretty—it’s out of the goat.

Nice! I do pretty decent out of the gate. As a matter of fact, though, the second Warrior Kid book I write, when I was about to finish it, I probably had another 5,000 words to finish and it was just through the first draft. And I had some stuff go on where I could—I just had to finish it and I submitted it and it was almost—it was almost good to go as well with very few edits on the first.

Literally the front—like normally I would have edited it three or four times; I did not edit it; I edited it once, and it got back—they get back to me. But yeah, so I write, I write hard.

Do I throw stuff out sometimes? Absolutely! But even if you write a thousand words, when you throw out 400, guess what? You got 600 words!

Yeah! Here cookin’, and in two or three months you got 50 or 60,000 words and you're done. So it’s a good little system. The other thing about it for anyone that’s interested in writing—you probably you are—but if you write every day, you don’t have to go back and read what you wrote the previous day because you still remember it.

Mm-hmm. For me, if I take two days—so if I write today and then I don’t write tomorrow and then I go to write again, I got to go back and read that. One day is enough for me to forget really where I was at, whereas if I write today, alright, tomorrow I can pick up; I can literally just start typing again because I know where I was at.

So if you’re gonna do it, that’s the disciplined manner to make it happen.

Yeah, I mean that's like maintaining some kind of flow state has always been a challenge for creative projects. And man, like, I'm so impressed with you guys with writing, the podcast, like constantly doing these muster events.

Like, you just got to stay on it; you got to keep the beat going, ‘cause it’s so easy to let it slip.

I mean I put—what was that event in New York? Like how’d that go?

You know, yeah, and I think the other thing is, you have to force—if you don’t put—if you don’t force it out of yourself, it’s not gonna happen.

If you don’t force it out of yourself, it’s not gonna happen. The book or the project or the thing that you want to do, the podcast that you're gonna do, yeah, if you don’t put discipline around it, it’s not going to happen.

I mean I've been putting out the podcast for 133 weeks and I've missed one. And you know, it’s like—that’s pudding. There’s a lot of pressure, there’s a lot of pressure and you’re reading a book and I like a book, you’re going back. There’s a lot to do, it’s—it’s no joke.

And but if I didn’t have the timeline, then guess what? It’s real easy to say, you know what? They don’t really need one, right? I don’t really—I can push this off. It’s real easy to do that.

It's real easy to do that with everything in life, whether it’s a workout, whether it’s writing, whether it’s a project you’re supposed to be doing, whether it’s sitting down at a computer screen to do and learn some technical skills that you know is gonna make you a better candidate for jobs—all those little things—discipline goes freedom; that’s what it is.

Yeah, 101!

Yep! Discipline equals freedom; 101. Are you guys working on something right now? Like, how are you improving yourself? I’m so curious.

I didn’t like—I read “Discipline Equals Freedom” on the flight over here; I was like, oh man, this is awesome!

Like I read the book, I listened to the podcast, so like I think I get this, but the book is great, but it’s this framework for life. Right? So whatever it might be, you just apply it.

Are there specific things? Because I think I’m—I’m curious about you guys just as men. Like things that you are personally working on right now, whether it—yeah, well, obviously, take the first job—I’m working at becoming a better father, quite frankly.

And people might think that sounds weird. Well, why aren’t you like trying to push a business for? Oh no, that is a requirement. We’re working 90-hour to 100-hour weeks writing, learning more about talent acquisition, how to solve these systemic challenges, that is gonna happen. That’s a requirement.

But it’s how do I balance my time really well to keep, you know, my kids more of my time? Because Jocko and I have talked about this a lot; when you’re in the military, your family comes second.

And that might sound harsh, but when you have 40 SEALs under your command that are your responsibility to bring home, you know, your day usually comes first. And I think the families understand that; it’s just some of the unsung heroes in the military are absolutely the wives and the children.

And so now that I’m out, I’m trying to, you know, achieve that dichotomy within my life to be a better father.

Do you have one?

Do I have one? No. Okay. I’ve got an infinite list of things that I’m trying to get better at all the time. I’m not getting an infinite list of things I’m trying to get better at all the time, and that’s just the way it is.

Yeah, I hate sucking. It’s tough, and I suck at all kinds of stuff. I’m trying to get better.

Dude, that’s the podcast! I keep meeting people who are just like the top 1% in their field: science, business, whatever it is. And you’re saying, “Alright, that’s a whole lifetime spent learning physics.”

Yeah. And just to do the interview, it takes a couple days to grow, you know, it’s a good thing for guys like Jocko and I and for anyone in any industry that wants to be the best. It's more about the process; it's not the end state. Like I find in it—and I’m sure you’ll agree; I find very little solace in achieving anything—it’s like, okay, that’s a, yeah! Immediately no, no celebrating—like what's next?

I just don't find any gratification. But, you know, if I look back at the process, I'm like, okay, that was pretty badass. That's good; let’s move on to the next thing.

And I find that amongst high, high performers, high achievers is that they're just never satisfied with the end state—it’s all about the process.

Yeah, what’s next?

Dude, it's so important to get good at something too because I’m tying on to that: before I had gotten really, really good at something, I didn’t fully understand that process and what it feels like. And then you just apply it to something else. What are you really, really good at?

I have a cycling world record, so I’m pretty good at riding bikes.

Yeah?

Yeah, it was a two days straight climbing up and down a hill, so it's most elevation in two days.

So, yeah, but once you do—but it was the same thing, man—like it wrapped up and like, alright dude, is amazing.

It’s so cool; like you're in the Guinness Book of World Records; that’s awesome!

Exactly, exactly, and like, you know, there’s someone chomping at your heels.

So, yeah, okay, I’ve got to say this is why you would love the guys we place in your companies. It's like the one thing about the teams that I loved is it was the competition made the world.

You know, I'm like if Jocko, like, you know, could shoot a target ten times within ten seconds, it was like I would be there all day until I could get nine seconds. And then he'd hear that nine-second it creates this culture of, you know, everyone gets along; they realize the competition makes everyone better. That was the great thing about the SEAL Teams; everything is a competition.

Yeah, yeah, well it's cool; you're surrounded by them still.

Guys, we got a bunch of questions for you from the internet, shall we?

Alright, so first question: Alex but medallion asks, what are some military tactics startups could adopt to increase effectiveness and throughput?

Yeah, we covered that corner.

Yeah, I mean but right there, it’s a cover move is the first thing I think about because if we’re not supporting each other, then we’re not gonna be able to get things done that we need to get done. So, work cover and move means teamwork.

Work together as a team, and I actually just had this discussion with a group—a company—and they had—they had reordered and put “simple” as the first law of combat. And I kind of joked around; it was the—the president that had done this and I joked around to him and I said, “Hey, there’s—he said, we—I did it cause it looked good on this graphic.” And I go, “It’s cool, I get it; that looks good on a graphic; but the reality is they are in an order of cover movie's number one. And the reason cover moves number one is because that’s teamwork.

And if we’re not working together, there’s—there’s what—we're not moving forward; we’re not gonna be effective; we’re not gonna be efficient. So when you look at what your mission is and you look at your submission that’s nested inside the greater message, don’t just focus on that. Make sure you look as a company, like how are we gonna help the other elements that are inside of our team? How we can help them move forward? Don’t just worry about yourself; worry about everyone that’s covered move.

I would go one further; take the laws of combat: cover and move, simple, prioritize and execute—decentralized command—and actually post it up on your wall.

Basically, why I love startups is it's the fire team. You all—you have limited resources; you have a small team; everyone has more to pull multiple tasks to do, and you have a burn rate that you have to manage. And to increase that 30—the throughput and drive revenue as quickly as possible.

I mean the laws of combat, if you reinforce this within your company, it will work! If you truly understand what they mean as a small team, you implement them, you will succeed!

Right on!

Next question!

Alright, Allen asks, “Hey Jocko, from your experience in SEAL and as a CEO in the business world, do two or more co-founders/leaders have a higher success rate? What are your thoughts on a solo founder with a strong team rather than a solo founder creating their own strong team?”

I think it’s a little strange to think about someone doing something solo and achieving anything really incredible. You’re gonna need a team; you’re gonna need people. And the more you trust your team and the better relationship you have with your team, then the better you’re gonna do.

So I think if you're a good—I think the critical thing here is you have to think about what you're gonna do. You have to think about what you're gonna do and how you’re gonna get it done. If you think you can accomplish things by yourself, you're probably a little bit mistaken—you might even be a lot mistaken.

If you think you've got every—if you think you know everything better than everyone else and that’s why you should control everything, it’s probably gonna end up problematic. To have somebody that’s a good sounding board is important.

Now the other thing I would say about this is it’s also important to find people and work with people that compliment who you are, that compliment your strengths and your weaknesses. If you’re a person that has great ideas but is bad at execution, you need to find a partner that’s really good at execution.

If you go out and find a partner that also has incredible ideas and you put this company together and it's filled with a bunch of ideas, guess what? No one’s gonna execute those ideas; you’re not gonna go anywhere. If you're a person that can execute well but maybe you don’t have some of those creative thought processes, you find someone that’s got good creative thought processes, so you want to partner with people, absolutely, and you want to partner with people that making you better in court.

Half before that is kind of like seeing the world as it is. That’s a problem I see with a lot of solo founders; they’re just like I got this figured out and then they're a little bit delusional. We see that in the military all the time in it; we called it emotional attachment.

So, you know, I would sit and chocolate past, “Hey we need to actually give this mission, go ahead and plan it.” And I planned it for three days, and during that process, because I think I’m coming up with this great plan that’s gonna want him. And then I present it and I’ve been one inch from viewing the plan for the last three days.

And then you know, he comes in from a six-foot view, he’s like “Oh good plan but you switch this, this, and this and this will go wrong if you do it that way.”

And then you know what I do? I lash out and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, usually away from the leave in that mother,” but he’s right!

And so the worst thing you can do is become so emotionally attached to your product that you stop listening to your customers because, in the military, we say the enemy has a vote in all plans—so does your customer.

And so the second you’ve got everything figured out and you stop listening to your customer, you need to step back, detach emotionally, and reassess, yep?

Do you guys do that by journaling?

Just buy it through experience!

Yeah, I can tell you, so people ask me about detachment a lot because I talk about the detachment a lot because detachment is definitely one of the key technical skills to have as a leader and as a human being, by the way!

And so there’s all kinds of things and I actually wrote about it in the kids’ book quite a bit. I wrote about how you emotionally detach because the kid loses his temper and gets in trouble, and guess what? You’ve got to learn to detach.

Well, guess human beings do that? Adults do that all the time. And so this idea of detaching is something that you absolutely have to focus on. How do you do it? Well, you have to learn to recognize when you are getting emotional because normally it’s to detach from the chaotic situation.

So if you’re on a construction site and something’s going wrong and you step back so that you can fix it. Or you’re in a manufacturing plant and something’s going wrong and you step back so you can fix it; you're stepping away from it physically—that’s—that’s good.

There’s also situations where you need to step away emotionally and that’s a little bit harder. And you know the examples that I talked about—me, first of all, if your voice starts getting like this. Well that’s you need to put yourself in check; you’re obviously getting emotional.

You also—if you’re getting ready to send an email and you're typing really hard on it, that’s probably not a good email to send; you should—you should wait 24 hours before you send that email up the chain of command.

And then there’s this part, and this is probably—this is the one that is most valuable. When you're looking at a situation and you're feeling the anger, the frustration: things aren’t going the way they're supposed to go, much of the time, you need to step back and you need to look at yourself and figure out why you are getting emotional.

And most of the time, I would venture to guess the reason that you're getting emotional, the reason they’re getting mad is because of your own ego. Someone has done something that’s offended your ego; someone has come up with a plan that’s better than yours; someone has come up with an idea that’s better than yours; someone has dared to confront something that you’ve said, when you should not be questioned!

And those ego flare-ups cause all kinds of emotions. And so if you don’t learn to detach from those and do real assessments and figure out object lean, emotionally what the problem is, then you will have some significant issues. So learn to detach!

Yeah, I mean oftentimes, the people that yeah when I was growing up, the people that bugged me the most had a quality that I didn’t have or wanted to have more of. And then you’re saying, oh that guy is more articulate, or he’s stronger, or whatever it is.

Yeah, and that was it to a tee.

Welcome! Welcome to my life, Greg!

Alright, next question: let’s see—Armando Novus asked to Jocko, I liked your episode strategy and the way of the samurai; I think that was Tim Ferriss, right?

So I did one with Tim Ferriss that was based on the novel Musashi, which is an incredible, incredible novel. And it's a historical fiction based on the life of the great Japanese swordsman Musashi. And then Musashi is the guy that wrote the book of five rings.

And I covered the book of five rings first before I did Musashi, just so people would have that background on it before we got into it. But the book of five rings is pretty famous; I think that was episode 80 and then the one with Tim was episode 100.

Cool! And that one is—I think that’s one of the few that’s over four hours long because when I got done, I was joking with Tim Ferriss. I was like, well, there’s the—you know, he’s got the four-hour workweek and the four-hour chef, and I was like, well, there’s the four-hour podcast! Totally!

Um, and we did it right after he had gotten out of some really psychotic fasting and both of silence deals, so he had been in silence for, oh, a long, some long period of time, and it was awesome; it was also cool to cover that.

But yeah, that’s—so that’s Musashi.

Okay, great! And then his question is how much does the daily warrior mindset—how much do you implement on a day-to-day basis?

I was thinking earlier when Mike was talking about the TAP program that gets you out of the