Jocko Willink on His Source of Motivation & Drive | Jocko Willink & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | What are your sources of motivation?
00:00:05.800 | And I'm going to guess that some of them are internal.
00:00:10.960 | We could point to head or we could point to heart, doesn't really matter.
00:00:14.420 | But like when you think of sources of motivation, do you have a palette of them that you can
00:00:19.720 | dip into?
00:00:21.080 | Do you even feel the need to dip into them or is it really just all about action steps
00:00:25.120 | throughout your day?
00:00:26.600 | Or if I can even venture into the somewhat, you know, harder stories that I've heard you
00:00:32.060 | talk about, do you sometimes think back and you're like, listen, I'm going to do this
00:00:35.040 | because there are a bunch of guys that are dead now that can't.
00:00:38.240 | And so I'm going to do it because I can.
00:00:40.880 | What are your, what are the paints on your motivation palette, if you will?
00:00:47.480 | Well, you probably, you probably heard me say that motivation isn't something that I
00:00:55.840 | am going to count on because it's just an emotion that's going to come and go.
00:01:02.160 | And it's just like feeling happy.
00:01:06.720 | You feel happy right now.
00:01:07.720 | Maybe you won't feel happy in 15 minutes.
00:01:09.280 | You feel sad now.
00:01:10.280 | Maybe you won't feel sad in 15 minutes, you feel motivated right now.
00:01:12.840 | You might not feel motivated in 15 minutes, therefore I can't rely on it.
00:01:16.480 | So I'm not going to put any, I'm not going to put any money on just being motivated because
00:01:23.840 | it doesn't really matter to me.
00:01:26.320 | So the daily actions that I take aren't from motivation.
00:01:32.400 | They're just from discipline.
00:01:33.400 | Like I said earlier, I'm not going to get up and go through some big debate about, well,
00:01:38.200 | do I really feel like doing this?
00:01:40.160 | No, I don't feel like doing this, but it doesn't matter.
00:01:42.220 | I'm just going to go do it.
00:01:47.120 | Now if we start to look at sort of a broader movement through life and continuing to try
00:01:57.680 | and move forward and move on, you know, uh, my buddy Seth died and he was the Delta platoon
00:02:09.240 | commander in tasking to bruiser and he, he died in 2017 and it was in a parachute accident.
00:02:20.360 | And it was, it was, I mean, it's definitely unexpected.
00:02:25.240 | Um, and, and also he'd already been through multiple deployments, um, was with, with us,
00:02:32.520 | with me in the battle of Ramadi.
00:02:34.720 | He then went back into solder city and, and led a ton of very dangerous operations.
00:02:41.680 | And then he did other deployments and was kind of done with his deployments, kind of
00:02:48.360 | done.
00:02:49.520 | And now he's just talking about when he's going to retire and he's a couple of years
00:02:54.520 | away from retirement.
00:02:55.520 | And, you know, I'm talking about, Hey, we're going to work together again.
00:02:59.760 | And it all seems like we're on a pretty good path to just move forward.
00:03:05.400 | And then he ends up dying in a, in a parachute accident.
00:03:08.800 | And he's a guy that, you know, was really just kind of, you're, you're, you're not going
00:03:12.960 | to be able to replace any, any, you can't, there's a uniqueness to him that is, you're
00:03:21.960 | not going to find.
00:03:22.960 | And, you know, I've got some stuff that he wrote, he was an incredible writer and I will
00:03:29.200 | like try and write something like him.
00:03:32.000 | I can't, we can't do it because he had a bigger vocabulary and a more articulate way of writing.
00:03:38.320 | And so I can't write anything as well as he wrote it.
00:03:40.160 | He was incredible at guitar.
00:03:42.160 | He played guitar, played ukulele, like sick, like an incredible at playing guitar.
00:03:49.080 | And he's a total knuckle dragger, like a total meathead knuckle dragger.
00:03:54.480 | You know, his nickname was unfrozen caveman because he just, he just, you know, look like
00:04:00.400 | a big caveman.
00:04:02.200 | And yet he spoke French and, you know, could recite French poetry and was really good at
00:04:09.160 | learning languages.
00:04:11.120 | And he was an artist and he had, you know, what's synesthesia is, you know what that
00:04:15.880 | is?
00:04:16.880 | Yeah.
00:04:17.880 | Emerging of the senses.
00:04:18.880 | So people, they can see colors and.
00:04:20.040 | So he didn't know what it was.
00:04:21.560 | Oh, sorry.
00:04:22.560 | I see colors.
00:04:23.560 | I hope most people can see colors.
00:04:24.560 | Sorry.
00:04:25.560 | That can hear colors and, and can associate particular colors with sound or like particular
00:04:30.000 | keys on the piano.
00:04:31.320 | It's, it's, it's pretty rare.
00:04:33.040 | Some people think they have it, but true synesthetics are pretty rare, but they don't have to fight
00:04:38.400 | for this trait.
00:04:40.440 | It just kind of emerges for them.
00:04:42.120 | He didn't know it, but one day he was talking to me and he was embarrassed to tell me, he's
00:04:47.240 | like, you know, what's weird is when I, when I think of numbers, I, I have colors in my
00:04:53.520 | head and, and I go, what do you mean?
00:04:56.720 | He, and he says hollow was zero.
00:04:59.280 | And I remember seven is yellow.
00:05:00.480 | I don't remember any of that, but he, he just rattled off like one, two, three, four, five,
00:05:03.560 | six, seven, eight, nine.
00:05:04.560 | You know, he says, you know, hollow, white, clear, all of, you know, just rattled off
00:05:08.760 | these colors.
00:05:09.760 | So he had this, this, he had that synesthesia and it gave him some kind of weird ability
00:05:13.480 | to memorize numbers.
00:05:14.960 | So, you know, he'd be in a bar and talk to some girl and he'd say, what's your number?
00:05:19.120 | And he would just, he would know it for two years.
00:05:21.200 | He would just know it.
00:05:22.720 | And that also made him incredibly good at playing guitar because now like the scale
00:05:27.760 | and the fret board of a guitar is this, it's a mathematical thing that he has all in this
00:05:32.080 | weird, this weird coloration scenario going on.
00:05:37.200 | So there's, so he's this guy and you know, and, and very, a very emotional guy, a very
00:05:45.240 | emotional guy who would, you know, you know, I was talking earlier about being a balance
00:05:50.280 | for someone.
00:05:51.280 | I had to balance this dude out on a daily basis sometimes, you know, he'd be so mad
00:05:55.980 | about something, you know, one, one day he'd be, I hate the teams, I hate all these guys.
00:06:00.800 | And I'd say, yeah, I get it, man.
00:06:02.360 | And the next day I'm on never getting out of the teams, you know, he would, he would
00:06:05.320 | oscillate that bad.
00:06:07.080 | And I would tell him, Hey, you're, Hey bro, you're oscillating again.
00:06:10.520 | And just would do anything.
00:06:12.040 | And he, and he loved his guys and would do anything for his guys.
00:06:19.240 | And so when he died, you know, we're, we're at his, we're at his, it's not his funeral.
00:06:29.520 | It's before the funeral.
00:06:30.560 | It's like the, the open casket thing, the wake thing.
00:06:34.640 | And myself, his brother, Alex, Leif Babin, who I wrote extreme ownership with, and JP
00:06:44.800 | Dinell, who's one of my brothers who, who works with us at Echelon Front now is with
00:06:49.360 | us in Ramadi and was very close to Seth.
00:06:52.040 | And we're like, everyone kind of cleared out for us.
00:06:56.800 | And we, we go in there and I think JP gave him, JP had one of those memorial bracelets
00:07:08.120 | with guys' names on it that had died and JP gave that to him.
00:07:12.680 | And I think Leif gave him some surf wax cause also Seth was a, was a surfer.
00:07:18.140 | And and I gave Seth his black belt cause he started training jujitsu with me and he had,
00:07:23.440 | he had his purple belt, he'd gotten his purple belt.
00:07:25.880 | I gave him his black belt and, and everyone was just quiet.
00:07:31.440 | And you know, JP was telling the story the other day and, and I just said, we will not
00:07:41.240 | fail him, meaning that him, Mark, Mikey, Chris, Seth, and countless other guys, they, they're
00:08:04.920 | not here.
00:08:05.920 | They don't have the opportunity to do the things we do.
00:08:08.720 | They don't have, they only have the opportunity to get up in the morning.
00:08:12.040 | So that's what it is, man.
00:08:20.360 | I won't fail those guys.
00:08:21.400 | [Music]