INNER STRENGTH & DISCIPLINE - Powerful Motivational Speech | Jocko Willink
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They make every detail look sweet.

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I never thought about quitting. If they told me to get back in the water again, let's go. They told me to put that log on my shoulder, let's go. Put the boat on my head, let's go. I didn't care. I wasn't the fastest, I wasn't the strongest, I wasn't the smartest, but I did know that I could work hard. I had to work hard. You're gonna struggle. You're gonna go through some hardship. You're gonna sweat, you're gonna choke, you're gonna get your arm broken. Like, these things are gonna happen.

okay, I'm going to go forward. There's no, I can't get out of this. I'm going to go forward. I'm not going to quit. So I'm going to go forward, bring it on. And I think if there's anything that you learn, it's to keep pushing through things that suck. And I would love to say like, oh, keep pushing through adversity, but this isn't adversity. This is just things that suck. It's one level below adversity. Adversity is when you're having a challenge. This is just something that's going to suck and you're going to have to push through it.

But it's like, "Oh, do you want to do this or not?" Which is what I think a lot of it boils down to. Do you actually want to do this or not? But the vast majority of people, they quit. But they don't usually say that. And even in their mind, they probably don't believe it. They probably believe, "Well, you know, it's my leg, and once my leg was hurting, I knew I was going to have a hard time on the runs, so I wasn't going to be able to make the runs. That's why I quit." But it wasn't really quitting, it was because of my leg. You're talking there about people making excuses. What have you come to learn about the nature of excuses?

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. 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 if these problems are because of me, then I'm capable of fixing these problems. I was a little kid. I wanted to be some kind of soldier. I wanted to be some kind of commando.

So I collected little plastic soldiers. I had different military units. And one of the historical military units that I had was the British commandos. And so I had these tiny figurines and they had machine guns and they had kayaks and they had little inflatable boats. And I thought to myself, that's what I want to do.

And then when I was probably around 12 or 13, I realized you actually could do that. You could actually get the job of being a commando. And the closest thing that I found was being in the Navy and being in the SEAL teams. I have to ask a very dumb question here, which is what is a Navy SEAL? So a Navy SEAL is a part of the Navy, but you're the special operations component of the Navy.

percentage of people that make it through SEAL training is about 20%. People that are under the age of 20, it goes down to about 5%. So, yeah, I was one of those like small percentage of people that are very young but still make it through. Well, they call the one of the weeks Hell Week, don't they? Mm-hmm.

So they try and simulate hell. Yeah, they try and simulate hell. It's about five and a half days, no sleep, lots of physical activity, lots of stress, lots of pain, and lots of people quit. I would say most of the people that quit, it's probably 80% of the quitters quit in that week. And it breaks people. The other thing is you might be an exceptional swimmer and you might be exceptional upper body strength, but you're not that fast of a runner. They're going to find that out.

Or you might be a fast runner, but a bad swimmer. They're going to find out what your weakness is. You might not like the cold. They're going to see it. You might not like the boat on your head. They're going to see it. They might see that you have a bad temper. They're going to find that and they're going to pick at that thing to either make you come out the other side or make you quit. One of the things they do is they'll line you up and they say interlock arms and you get arm in arm with the guy next to you and they say forward march and you march in the water and they say take seats and you sit down.

and they leave you in there. And it's called surf torture. And you just sit there. And after a while, they'll pull you up out of the water, they'll line you up, and the doctor will come down and see if anyone has hypothermia. And if no one has hypothermia or signs of hypothermia yet, get back in the water. And they just keep doing that. Did you have some kind of innate advantage, or can we all become Jocko? If I had to guess, I would say no. I would say you can't teach it. I would say that you can grow it,

If you've got the seed of some sort of fire, you could probably grow and you can get better at it. But it's the same thing. You go back to like, if you ever met anyone that was a prisoner of war, there's some people that had a will that they were not going to die. I'm not going to die. I'm going to keep going. And if you didn't have that will to carry on, you die. And the people that died, they did not have the will to live. And think about how bad things have to be before you say, you know what? I'm just going to lay here and die.

And that can get to that point. It was a guy who was, yeah, going through hardship with his job, with his marriage. And the marriage was coming to an end. The job was not, was going to come to an end as well. And he's out there and doesn't know what to do. And the analogy that I set up for him is if I'm in the woods, which is where you are right now, you're in the woods and you don't know where to go.

because the wife's not there anymore the job's not there anymore you don't know where to go right now so if you're in the woods and you don't know where to go start walking you've got to start walking because the perspective is not going to change you have to start moving forward you have to start taking steps in order to improve your vision improve your perspective change your perspective make some kind of progress and worst case scenario you figure out that you walk the wrong direction okay now you can walk in the other direction and that's that's going to be fine

but standing there lost and not doing anything is just waiting to die waiting to starve to death don't let that happen if you frame things right in your life if you frame a business challenge as an opportunity to build a stronger team if you if you frame a personal challenge as an opportunity to overcome and improve yourself these things that seem so horrible are actually

very positive components of your existence and they're going to make you and you're going to have to push through it. When the excuses all go away and people can actually confront the fact that this is all because of me, it's also liberating because now you have control over your fate and over your destiny and that is a glorious thing.

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