GET IT DONE, NO EXCUSES - Powerful Motivational Speeches Compilation | Jocko Willink
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Almost immediately, we're going to memorial services for Army guys, Marines that are killed, which, you know, was a rude awakening. So that's the welcome to Ramadi. The welcome to Ramadi is...

You know, you're gonna go and pay your respects to some guys that were just killed. And there's firefights in the city. So we're just across the river from the city. There's firefights in the city all day. There's firefights in the city all night. We're on the rooftop of our building. You can sit there and watch tracer fire go back and forth. We're shot at from, you know, across the riverbank. There's, yeah, it was legit. It was legit combat. It was a legit battle.

bad scenario with Sustained combat operations. How do you lead your men through that when you know they're dealing with not only the funerals Which definitely take a psychological toll, but then even that just constant firefighting over there I mean, do you have to switch up your gear and think okay? I got a lead stronger or maybe a little easier in certain scenarios. Are you changing? Yes, you do have to modulate your your leadership and you have to do that in

If you're in the business world, you have to do that if you're leading any kind of team. You've got to modulate and you've got to recognize when your guys need to be pushed and when your guys need to be not pushed and given a rest. So you're constantly doing that regardless of what kind of team you're leading. And in combat, like, you know, I say all the time, it's amplified because if you push your guys too hard in combat, they're going to break. You know, whereas in business, oh, maybe they make errors on something or maybe they do snap. I mean, it does happen in the business world where people like can't take it anymore.

But in combat it'll happen very quickly. And so, you know, you do, you're constantly modulating and taking measure of where your guys are at. And, you know, sometimes I didn't do a great job of that. Sometimes I went a little far and said, ooh, wow, I just saw the look on that guy's face. He needs a rest. And I should have recognized that earlier. And, you know, you make mistakes, no doubt.

What I had on my side was I had experience and I had paid attention to my elders when I was a kid. And when I was getting trained and there was no war going on and it was the 90s and I'd hear a guy, you know, someone whose name you'll never hear, but a guy that if you're in the SEAL teams, you know who that person is because they were a legit badass Vietnam war hero. You'd hear them say something. I would hear them say something.

And I would collect that and I would hang on to it. That's what prepared me was that experience of growing up with listening to my elders. The SEAL team doctrine wasn't written down anywhere. It was all word of mouth and passed down from generation to generation that way. And...

Making sure that you're not being cocky. Making sure that you don't have the attitude that you talked about earlier of, you know, we're always going to be better than the enemy. We're always going to win because you're not always going to win. And especially if you think you're always going to win, then you're not going to prepare the way you should. You're not going to give everything you can to your training to making sure that you are prepared for that moment when it comes. And it might come once on a deployment. It might not come on a deployment. And it might come on a daily basis. The centuries that are trying to

hold down the fort and protect would take cover from all this, all this enemy fire that was coming at them. In would come a big suicide vehicle-borne IED, truck-loaded bomb, and they would just drive right into the compound and detonate themselves and kill dozens of people. And they did that on multiple occasions. They did it times where they did it to multiple areas at the same time. So that's how coordinated the enemy was. They were, they knew what they were doing. Were you impressed by them? Were you ever like...

Didn't expect that to happen or did you ever have a respect for their tactics? I absolutely always had respect I respect the enemy absolutely And the minute you're not showing respect to the enemy and their capabilities is again That's a lack of humility and it's gonna get you killed You know they you you have to respect your enemy at all times and whether your mission is go out and capture kill bad guys or your mission is to produce something or sell something or manufacture something or design something trying to get that team to

to be unified behind a plan and executed efficiently, it doesn't matter what the mission is. You're still dealing with human beings. You're still dealing with people. Whether you're in the SEAL teams or whether you're in the Army or the Marine Corps, the people that are working for you are not robots.

They're people and you cannot give them orders and expect them to just execute like a robot would. If the military was like that, then military leadership would be the easiest thing in the world. You know, my guys wouldn't just do what I told them because I outranked them. And I kind of get that funny look. Let me ask you this. I'm here because your employees aren't doing what you want them to do, right? Can you just fire them?

Don't they work for you? Aren't they supposed to follow you because you're in charge and you write their paycheck? But all of a sudden they're not doing what you tell them to do. Why is that? It's the same exact reason because they're people. And guess what? People want to own their own destiny. They want to be in charge of what's happening. They want to take ownership. They want to create the plan. That's how they want to go through life. They want to go through life being treated like a robot. They want to be treated like a human. So...

Don't talk to me about, oh, well, it was easy for you because you had these highly trained, highly disciplined, you know, Terminator robots that work for you. Not true. In fact, the opposite. I had a bunch of hardheaded, you know, the guys that you talked about earlier. I had a bunch of hardheaded, very determined, thick-skulled guys that, you know, I had to get them to do what I wanted them to do. I had to get them to want to do what I wanted them to do. I had to make them think that it was what they wanted to do.

That's the goal. That's what leadership is. And the worse your plan is thought out, the less response you're gonna get. And just like in business world, the less input I get from you as we create this plan,

the less apt you are to execute it correctly. So when it comes time, when you have to go execute something, I want you to plan it. I'm not gonna plan it for you. I want you to plan it. Now I'm gonna come and check out your plan and we'll collaborate to make sure it's the best plan 'cause maybe I have more experience than you or maybe I have some strategic vision that you don't have, but I want you to plan it. That way you own it. And if you own it, when you go to execute it, you're gonna put that much more effort into it. That's hard to quantify, but that's real. That is real. If you come up with a plan,

You're gonna put more effort and more pride in executing that plan than if I come up with a plan and I give it to you and tell you to execute it. That's just a reality. I don't care who you are. That's a reality. Ordering people to do things does not work. You actually have to lead them. And that's another buzzword out there is this, is accountability.

You gotta be accountable, you gotta hold your people accountable. And to me, accountability is a tool. It's a tool of leadership. But it's not the primary tool of leadership. It's actually a crutch. It's actually a tool to use when you don't pull off leadership correctly. So what you wanna do, I talk about this all the time. I didn't hold my guys accountable.

I didn't walk down the line and inspect what they were doing. No, I didn't have to hold them accountable. They wanted to do the right thing. They wanted to do what was aligned with the mission. I had to hold them back. Never mind make them do it, and that's what leadership is. It's not about accountability. It's about leading and getting them to lead themselves and getting them to take ownership of things. That's when you know you've succeeded as a leader when you're just about out of a job.

When you're sitting back and you don't have to do anything because your frontline troops and your subordinate leadership is making things happen with almost no effort from you. And the only time you have to step in is when something's going sideways or you see something getting off track, you got to step back in there. But the ideal is that you can sit back, observe,

Start looking at what the other strategy is, what to do next, other problems, other parts of the world, but you can just let your people do what they want to do because they want to do it. Not because you have to breathe down their shoulder and hold them accountable. Not the way to lead. And to that same young man that wants to be a CEO, you know, the guys that want to be like Jocko one day, what do you tell that, that 20-year-old that sees this thing and says, I want to go do that? Well, first of all, don't try and be like me. Be better than me. Crush me.

Make me look like a baby. That's what you do. And don't talk about it. Don't mull it over. Don't plan for it. Just get after it. Get after it. Make it happen. Use your force of will to make it happen. As a human being, the strongest thing you've got is your force of will. So take that force of will and make that happen.

There's 200 people or 150 people that start the class. There's a hundred helmets of people that quit. Grown men whose dream it was to be a SEAL that get there, that did all this physical training and all this preparation and signed that dotted line and committed to six years and they show up there and they get to that training and they ring that bell. No one knows who's going to make it through that program.

The only way to know what's in the core of a human being is to rip that thing apart and see what's in there. And until you rip it apart and see what's in there, you don't know. What does it take to not ring the bell? Don't quit. People always ask me, what should I concentrate on? What's your advice for me going to Bud's? Don't quit. Don't quit. Train hard, don't quit. Well, if you want to be a good leader, you have to understand human nature.

And the places where human nature reveals itself most clearly are times of extreme suffering and inhumanity. I had a bunch of hard-headed, very determined, thick-skulled guys that, you know, I had to get them to do what I wanted them to do. I had to get them to want to do. Trust is built on relationships. Relationships are built on trust. If you don't trust me, we don't really have a relationship.

My first platoon, we were doing a training operation. We get into this tactical situation. Everyone in my platoon is focused on one area. Everyone's looking down their weapons, waiting for a threat to expose itself. Which means you got 16 guys looking down their weapons, and I'm waiting for someone to make a call. I was a new guy. I'm waiting for someone above me in the chain of command to say, "Hey, move here," or, "Hey, move forward," or make some kind of a decision. And as I'm waiting, no one's doing it. So I'm a new guy.

I'm scared to say anything and I know I shouldn't say anything so I'm just waiting and no one's giving an order, no one's giving any direction. So I wait longer and this goes on for probably 30 seconds or a minute which is a really long time when you're trying to take down a target.

And finally I said to myself, alright, I'm going to see what's going on. So I actually put my weapon at the ceiling and I take a step back and I just look around. And I see that every single person in my platoon, including my platoon commander, including the assistant platoon commander, including the...

platoon, leading pedigree officer, everyone is just focused on their weapons and no one's making a decision. And I can see this. And because I'm looking around and I'm detached from the scenario, just by eight inches, I stepped back. Stepped back and looked around. I can see what decision needs to be made. And so I summoned up as much courage as I could as a new guy, because new guys don't make decisions. And I said,

"Hold left, clear right." Which is a basic command that we'd rehearse and you would practice. And I expected someone to say, you know, "Shut up! Shut up, Jocko!" But instead they repeated the command. They all said, "Hold left, clear right." Which means we were gonna execute it. And sure enough, the guys on the left held and the guys on the right cleared it. We got done and instead of someone saying, "Hey, you need to keep your mouth shut." Like one of the more senior guys said, "Hey, good job up there. Way to make a call."

So I looked at it and said, wait a second, how could I, as a new guy, have made a decision in that situation that was better than what the more senior, more experienced guys were making? And I realized it was because I took a step back and detached from that. So at that moment, I said to myself, okay, from now on, when I get into these tactical scenarios, I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to try and look around and I'm going to try and detach myself from the chaos and the mayhem.

And I started doing it all the time. In every tactical situation, in the land, warfare, in the mountains, in the urban environments, I was doing it all the time. And I was able to like see what was happening. It was like a superpower to be able to see what was happening and make decisions. And so then I actually started doing it when I was having conversations. And if you and I weren't in disagreement,

And you started getting emotional. Instead of me getting emotional back at you, I would just take a step back and be like, oh, okay, he's really concerned about this. Why is he so concerned? What does he see that I don't see? And I started actually just detaching all the time. And that became a very powerful tool in leadership that I use to this day. My second platoon, our platoon commander, the guy actually in charge of the whole platoon,

He's not very experienced. He didn't listen. He didn't take advice. He didn't take guidance. Everything was like his way or the highway. And we had a mutiny inside of our platoon. We went to our commanding officer and said, "Hey, sir, we don't want to work for our platoon commander. He doesn't listen. He's arrogant."

And eventually what ended up happening was this guy got fired as our platoon commander. And that left an impact on me because as I'm watching this going, I'm thinking to myself, why don't we like this guy? Why doesn't anyone want to listen to this guy? Why don't we want to follow this guy? And the reason is because he was arrogant and he didn't listen and he didn't give us any ownership of everything. Everything was about him. And that would have made an impression on me. That would have left a mark. But the mark got left even more clearly because when that guy got fired, the guy that came in and took over for him

was like, I hate to use the word legendary, but he was a pretty legendary SEAL, had a ton of experience. He'd come up through the ranks and he had been stationed at every different kind of SEAL team and he took over as our platoon commander. And I kind of thought to myself, well, he's going to take over because we're a bunch of mutineers and they need to put someone really strong that's going to whip us back into shape. So I was anticipating that we were going to have this super hardcore guy. And this guy shows up

And he's got a nice smile on his face and he's super humble. And I remember one of the first things he said to us was like, I look forward to working with you guys. And I was, that word right there, I'm going to work with you guys. Not I'm in charge, I'm glad I'm taking over, I'm glad to be your commander. It was nothing like that. He said, hey, I'm looking forward to working with you guys. So all of a sudden it was totally different. And he started putting us in charge of things. Instead of him coming up with a plan, he would say, hey, you guys come up with a plan and let me know how you want to do it.

And all of a sudden we had all this ownership and that made me reflect on the way the first guy had acted compared to the way this guy had acted. And I realized how important it was to be a humble leader and to listen to other people and to give ownership to other people.

In the third platoon, it was a good solid platoon and we had a good platoon commander and we were out in the desert doing some training and some targets popped up. We start engaging the targets like we're supposed to and everyone gets in the prone position and is returning fire. And I did what I had been doing this whole time, which was detach. I kind of took a step back, shot a couple rounds, then kind of pulled back and looked to see what was going on. And I saw the call that needed to be made.

And I gave the platoon commander a couple seconds to make a call and he didn't make it. So, you know, I made the call. Peel left! And everyone said, okay, peel left. And we peeled left and we left the scenario and we got our distance and then we stopped the training exercise and we did a little debrief. And during the debrief, the platoon commander, you know, he said to me, well, why did you make that call?

And I said, well, I can see what we needed to do, you know, and you hadn't made a call. So I, you know, I made the call and he goes, well, I actually didn't want to peel left. I wanted to assault the target. And right there in that split second, I kind of thought to myself, well, like part of my ego flared up and I was kind of thinking I could have said something along the lines of, well, you need to make a call faster. If you're not going to step up and lead, then I'm going to do it. Like I could have said that. But I realized at that moment in time, wait a second, I didn't need to make a call. The problem could have developed more.

But for some reason I thought that I needed to be the guy. And I said, no, you know what? You don't need to be the guy. You're a leader. You need to support your leader. And it's not about you. And what you have to do is subordinate your ego and be supportive of the person that's in charge and you move forward together as a team. Because that's what it's about. It's not about me. It's about the team. There's a word that people bring up a lot.

And I think they're pretty interchangeable in its relationships and trust, right? Trust is built on relationships, relationships are built on trust. If you don't trust me, we don't really have a relationship. If you want to be a good leader, you have to understand human nature. And the places where human nature reveals itself most clearly are times of extreme sorrow, pain, suffering, and inhumanity.

And if we don't recognize what causes that, where that comes from, and that it's actually possible, then it's bound to happen again. You feel like your life is going to last a long time. And if I was to talk to my 26-year-old self, I would tell that kid that you don't have time. And you really, you don't know when it's going to end. And so...

Get out there and do the things you want to do. Get out there and get after them now. Don't wait another second. Take advantage of it. Get out there and live and strive to be better because the life you've got, which I just said was a gift, it is a gift. So live it. Yeah, I always wanted to be a commando ever since I was a little kid and

I heard that the SEALs were really tough and that the training was really tough. And then, you know, once you get in, everyone makes a big deal out of buds that's... But it's... In the SEAL teams, it's no big deal. Everyone goes through it. You get cold, you get wet, whatever. You do a bunch of push-ups and pull-ups and dips.

Anyone that gets to the SEAL teams and does deployments overseas and has a real career, they're not talking about BUDZ training. It just doesn't mean anything. I had a guy that was, you know, NCAA water polo team captain champion. He quit. And I had a guy that was an Olympic ultimate gymnast, and he quit. Just because someone's a good physical athlete, it doesn't mean that they're a good SEAL.

Because being a good SEAL is a lot more than just being a good athlete. Being a good athlete is like the baseline and it's everything that you learn to do after that. A good leader, a guy that's tactically sound, a guy that makes good decisions, a guy that's good under pressure, a guy that doesn't ever give up on trying to accomplish a mission. Those are the things that makes a good SEAL.

So you're always learning and growing and I was always learning until the day I retired because it's not a boom this happened and everything changes. It's a constant addition of skill set and repetition of situations where you become competent at your job. The fear of getting shot or killed

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After 30 gigabytes, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan. I can create a future that I look forward to. I can get where I was meant to go. I can transfer to a four-year university.

When you pursue an associate degree for transfer at a California community college, you're on your way to earning your guaranteed safe spot at a four-year university. With an associate degree for transfer, I can do this. Classes can fill up quickly, so enroll today at icangotocollege.com. It's not on your mind when you're in the moment. You know, it'll build up when you're waiting to go out. You know, there's times you're waiting to go out and you're like thinking to yourself, okay,

There's a lot of bad things going on out there and some of them would happen to me. But I think at some point you realize that there's nothing you can do about that. I mean, other than just quit and just resign yourself to a life of cowardice. But if you opt to not do that and you step up and say, okay, I'm ready. And if I die, I die. And once you overcome that, then nothing else to be afraid of.

There's no one that wishes for peace more than people that have been to war. Because when the war drums sound, it's my friends that are going to fight. That's who's going to fight. It's my friends that are going to put their lives on the line. So when the war drums sound, the people that have been to war are the ones that actually say, let's think about this first. Because

Like I said before, and like everyone says all the time, and they say it like it's no big deal, but war is hell. When you take an 18-year-old kid and you're going to go put him in a situation where he's going to have to kill people and possibly get wounded or possibly get killed himself, that's a traumatic experience. And so before you do that, you should think about why you're doing it and understand if the people have the will to fight.

And the will to fight, as I've said many times before, the will to fight is the will to kill and it's the will to die. And those are some pretty big wills that you need to have. Almost what is preventing most people from moving in the direction that they want to move is a lack of discipline. And no one wants to hear that answer. It's the harshest answer. This is hard work. It's every day. When they see that word discipline, it's actually a slap in the face because they know it's true.

Do you have any fraction of self-discipline? The ability to not want to do it but still do it. That's the most powerful thing in the world. What are you going to get without discipline? Are you going to be in good physical shape without discipline? Are you going to be financially successful without discipline? Are you going to become more intellectually powerful without discipline? You're going to see me for who I am because I need to change who I'm not. Discipline is the root of all good qualities.

If you want to make progress in your life, you've got to have discipline. Discipline equals freedom. You want freedom in your life? You want to achieve what it is you want to achieve? How do you do that? You do it through discipline. You do it through hard work. You do it by knowing what it is you're supposed to do and then actually doing it. You have to face yourself. What am I going to do today to change what I see in this mirror?

It starts with yourself, man. Through hard work, you can outwork anybody. Like I'm going to be extreme in my discipline. Somebody asked me that on social media. How do you master discipline? I'm like, you don't. You don't. You keep working at it though. Every day. Yes.

It takes power, it takes effort, it takes discipline to break the old you. What gives you confidence is not being afraid. It's overcoming the fear. There's no one in the world that enjoys taking criticism. It's in the discomfort zone is where my confidence is getting built. The tougher things you go through, the more confidence you're going to have. The more confidence you have, the better you're going to get. But I'm going to work and try and make myself better. And that's the mentality you have.

A lot of us who are afraid of something, we allow our minds to choose the path of least resistance and we go a different route. What I did was what I knew how to do, which was work. You figure it out by going inside yourself. Because being a warrior takes a whole different mindset. That's what I'm gonna do. When I was a little tiny kid, you know, five, six, the only thing I could remember was wanting to be some kind of commando. There was no, there was not any question for me. I knew what I wanted to do.

I never thought about quitting at any moment in time. SEAL Themes is going to war. That's what we do. You're lucky that you don't have to think like warriors think. You're very privileged. I chose this world to be a warrior and I would choose it again if I came back to this world. But the mentality of a warrior is very different than the normal mentality. You must be that person on that door, getting ready to open it, thinking to yourself, "If I die,

So be it. Because being a warrior takes a whole different mindset. And the fact of the matter is, bullets don't have your name on it. Bullets say to whom it may concern. And the bullet doesn't care who you are. They don't care how much training you've had. They don't care how well prepared you are. And if it's your day, it's your day. And so I think once you get to a point where you recognize and accept the fact that you could die, then you can move past that. It's a really high percentage of people that quit, but there's also people that fail.

We have the ability to go in such a space if you're willing to suffer, and I mean suffer, your brain and your body once connected together can do anything. When you're driven, whatever's in front of you will get destroyed. I was just a scared kid that found drive and passion to be something much better than what he thought he was. And that's why I talk about the warrior mentality. The only way you can go in that door is knowing there's a great chance you're gonna die.

I worry about missing out on opportunities that I have because I got friends that will never get the chance to execute on opportunities because they didn't come home. And that's literally what I told my guys was we've crossed the line and there's no possible way to replace or describe or overcome the amount of just

heart-wrenching sadness that you feel when you lose a teammate. I didn't know what to do.

And I didn't know what to say. First time, second time, third time. What I did was, and I told my guys, I don't know what to do. I don't know what to tell you. The only thing that I know to do is to go back to work. And I do know this, if Mark was here, he would want us to go back to work. And so we're going to lock and load our weapons and we're going to go do what we do. That's the reality of combat. When you see...

people in these hard situations. That's when human nature gets revealed. And the more you can understand human nature, the better leader you're going to be. There's only one type of human being that can't improve as a leader. And that's the person that lacks humility. Because when someone lacks humility, you can't teach them. A leader has to be balanced. The older I get, the less I know.

One of the things that I realized in a leadership position is that the words that you say matter, the actions you take matter. People are listening, people are watching, people are respecting or disrespecting you based on how you carry yourself. Relationships and trust are almost the same word, right? A relationship is something that we've built trust. Now you can have a bad relationship and what does that mean? That means there's no trust there. I don't trust you, we have a bad relationship.

The way I build trust with people is I give them trust. That's how I build trust. I give it. I give trust to build trust. If I micromanage you and I don't let you make any decisions yourself, well, you're never going to step up and learn how to lead because you don't get to make any decisions for yourself. Would you rather win or be liked? Well, I'm going to tell you those aren't opposites. The team that likes each other, they win.

I'm trying to take the lessons that I was lucky enough to learn and get them to as many people as I can so they don't have to suffer through the same mistakes that I made. I mean, you're always going to have regret. You know, I don't spend a lot of time with regret, you know, because there's not much that you can do about it. So the way I look at regret is what did I learn from it? What did I learn from whatever thing I'm looking at that I know I could have done a better job, could have done different?

There's a million things like that, but I don't sit there and think about them all day long. What I think is like, hey, here's the lessons that I learned from them. I will make those mistakes again and move forward. Every single day for me, it starts in ground zero. I've got to go forward with an open mind, with a humble mind, looking at the world. When somebody gives you feedback, you listen to it. Number one, you've got to be humble. And if you're not humble, you're not looking for feedback and you're not listening to it.

No feedback, no improvement. Feedback is built upon being humble. Everything that I look at, I try and look at from a humble perspective. And if you don't do that, it's going to be a problem. If I'm looking down the sights of my weapon and I'm shooting, my world is this big. The minute that I stop shooting, point my weapon at high court, take a step back and actually look around, I can see infinitely more. Eventually, you've got to start doing it.

As a leader, you should be listening 98% of the time and talking 2% of the time. And you're going to fail, and you're going to fail, and you're going to fail, and you're going to fail, and then you're going to win. And that's life. Life without those challenges, it's just existence. Don't just exist. Go live. Eventually, inaction will cost you. But your default setting should be, I'm going to do something. Just get up, move towards that challenge, and go attack it. Go do something that's hard.

Struggle sucks. Depends on how you frame it. If you want freedom in your life, you have to have discipline. Move towards that challenge, whatever that challenge is. And you may be successful and you may not be successful, but you will be better. And the next challenge, you can be more prepared for. 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 to have bad relationships. We're going to have good ideas and bad ideas. We're going to 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. Embrace those emotions, but don't let those emotions embrace you. Keep pushing through things that suck. This is a very difficult thing to do because it hurts. I'm going to go forward. I'm not going to quit. So I'm going to go forward. Bring it on.

When you talk to people that went to SEAL training that didn't make it, most of the time, it's some reason. There's a medical reason. There's a family problem. There's very few people that look at you and say, oh, I quit because it sucked, which is what happens to the vast majority of people. The vast majority of people that don't make it through SEAL training, they didn't make it through because they quit. Your excuses will destroy you and take everything that you ever wanted from you if you let them.

When your excuses make you feel a little bit better about the fact that you didn't execute on what you needed to execute on, then they can make you feel better. But they're not helping you. They're not helping you at all. This went wrong. This failed. Didn't accomplish this. And it's not the fault of my boss. It's not the fault of my girlfriend. It's not the fault of my parents. It's not the fault of the weather. It's my fault. And I'm going to take ownership of it and I'm going to fix it. That's what extreme ownership is.

Because when you look around at your life and you look around at your job and your financial situation and your relationship and your physical health, and when you look at all those things and all the problems that you may have with those things, and you say, the reason I have all those problems is because of me, that can hurt. That can sting. And a lot of times our ego rejects that and makes excuses and lies. And then we don't have to change anything. And then nothing changes.

When the excuses all go away and people can actually confront the fact that this is all because of me, it hurts but is also unbelievably empowering because the more discipline you have in your life, the more freedom you will end up with. So 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 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.

You have discipline. You will attain freedom. 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. And if you don't have that kind of discipline and you don't work hard and you don't exercise and you don't apply yourself, you're gonna end up shackled. So if you're in the woods and you don't know where to go, start walking. You've got to start walking because the perspective is not going to change.

You have to start moving forward. But standing there lost and not doing anything is just waiting to die, waiting to starve to death. Don't let that happen. I 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 there's a lot of men struggling right now. Every human faces challenges and you don't know what they've been through. Suppressing them isn't going to help and nor is letting them run your life.

Because you're sad, now you're going to make a bunch of bad decisions because you're sad. No, 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. 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 some friends or I had this traumatic experience happen to me. That's why I'm doing, that's just an excuse. And it's a very easy excuse. Guess what? It's time to carry on. Remember, don't dwell. I'm in control. This is my life.

If you are in the problem, you won't see the solution to the problem. 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 that is the job of a leader. 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.

Is it good to have no emotions whatsoever? No, that's called a sociopath. Is it good 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? We want to be balanced. It's much easier to be extreme. It's much easier to say, oh...

No emotions? Cool. And turn them off. That's easier. Or 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. But you have to be balanced. Because what I want is for the team to win. So be balanced. You're going to be okay.

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We're sending our kids to their dream colleges, but finding straightforward ways to turn those dreams into realistic goals, that's where things get tricky. Merrill understands that. That's why, with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. And having the bull at your back helps your whole financial life move with you.

So when your plans change, Merrill is with you every step of the way. Go to ml.com slash bullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, registered broker-dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC.