Mindset of Winning & Losing, Managing Moral | Jocko Willink & Dr. Andrew Huberman
00:00:00.000 | When we win, we feel like we can keep going, right?
00:00:05.000 | You look at the team that wins and it's like,
00:00:07.040 | they'll play another game.
00:00:08.500 | The Superbowl winners,
00:00:09.340 | or you imagine they're jumping up and down
00:00:10.840 | and they could probably play another Superbowl.
00:00:13.560 | Losing, we know can,
00:00:15.160 | sure it can drop things like testosterone and dopamine
00:00:17.800 | for some period of time.
00:00:18.760 | But when you were in the teams,
00:00:21.080 | what was your observation about how winning and losing
00:00:24.920 | would impact people in the short and long-term?
00:00:27.400 | In other words, would you observe people
00:00:28.780 | that had a quick reset button
00:00:30.400 | and could just say that was terrible?
00:00:32.800 | And then transmute,
00:00:35.720 | I guess I'm getting into kind of the Eastern language now,
00:00:39.480 | convert that into energy to go do better the next time.
00:00:44.480 | Whereas we also see people, military
00:00:46.380 | and in the civilian world,
00:00:48.120 | that a loss, in particular severe losses,
00:00:51.560 | basically set them down the path of like less energy.
00:00:54.880 | It certainly isn't less calories.
00:00:56.240 | In fact, most of the time it's the other way.
00:00:57.440 | They start consuming more calories
00:00:58.720 | and that doesn't get them going.
00:00:59.680 | So again, this notion of energy,
00:01:01.280 | and now I'm asking wins versus losses,
00:01:04.000 | what did you observe?
00:01:05.360 | And from the perspective of leadership,
00:01:07.440 | and maybe more importantly,
00:01:08.440 | from the perspective of yourself,
00:01:10.800 | how do you work with that?
00:01:12.500 | How do you calibrate wins and losses?
00:01:14.440 | How do you transmute losses into energy?
00:01:17.260 | Because wins we know convert to energy,
00:01:19.480 | but losses oftentimes can sap our energy way, way down.
00:01:23.960 | - I think to start with,
00:01:28.440 | I think that the selection process
00:01:30.280 | to get into the SEAL teams
00:01:32.600 | is going to weed out a bunch of people
00:01:35.700 | that can't recover very quickly from something bad.
00:01:39.240 | So you probably heard these type of stories before.
00:01:42.840 | The kid that was the star of the football team,
00:01:45.360 | the star of the basketball team,
00:01:47.420 | the captain of this, the captain of that,
00:01:48.960 | he's been winning his whole life.
00:01:50.120 | He goes to Bud's and he quits.
00:01:52.440 | Because in Bud's, you're not gonna win.
00:01:55.160 | You're certainly not gonna win everything.
00:01:57.280 | They're gonna find what you're not good at,
00:02:00.000 | and they're gonna exploit that, and you're gonna lose.
00:02:03.840 | This is what happens.
00:02:05.400 | So a lot of guys that may lose
00:02:09.280 | and it disrupts their motivation,
00:02:12.600 | they're probably just gonna quit.
00:02:14.840 | And so that's why you get this massive attrition rate
00:02:18.280 | with guys that are studs.
00:02:20.480 | I mean, we're talking Division I athletes.
00:02:24.360 | Division I athlete, Division I wrestlers,
00:02:26.000 | Division I football players,
00:02:27.160 | Division I runners and swimmers,
00:02:28.560 | they all come to Bud's, they all quit.
00:02:30.120 | Not all of them quit, but there's plenty of examples
00:02:33.320 | of the highest level of collegiate athlete
00:02:36.200 | in sports that translate very well
00:02:39.040 | to what you're doing in basic SEAL training, and they quit.
00:02:43.960 | And sometimes it's because they don't know how to lose,
00:02:46.400 | they don't know how to recover from a loss,
00:02:48.680 | and they're just, so I think already,
00:02:51.680 | and once you get to a SEAL team,
00:02:53.920 | you've got people that are, generally speaking,
00:02:58.000 | gonna be pretty resilient
00:02:59.240 | when it comes to dealing with a loss.
00:03:02.680 | Not only that, I mean, you just get used,
00:03:04.280 | you talk about losing people.
00:03:06.080 | You're friends with this guy,
00:03:07.480 | you meet this guy in SEAL training.
00:03:09.040 | Hey, this guy seems like a stud.
00:03:10.600 | Oh, he's just gonna quit.
00:03:12.000 | And you're gonna lose five, six, seven people, eight people.
00:03:15.800 | People quit so fast, you don't even keep track of them.
00:03:18.600 | So you're just gonna lose, you're just gonna get used to it.
00:03:21.880 | So there's that.
00:03:22.880 | Now, once you're in the teams,
00:03:25.400 | and what you're talking about
00:03:26.520 | is now you start taking much more significant loss.
00:03:29.360 | You're not losing a race,
00:03:30.200 | you're losing one of your friends.
00:03:31.160 | And this is what, from a leadership perspective,
00:03:33.640 | you have to pay attention to.
00:03:35.200 | So when you're a leader in any organization,
00:03:38.480 | you're basically in charge of a mob.
00:03:42.520 | When it comes to what their morale is,
00:03:44.720 | they're a mob, and they feed off of each other
00:03:47.240 | just like a mob riding in the streets,
00:03:49.000 | going, oh, we can break this window,
00:03:50.120 | let's break all the windows.
00:03:50.960 | And they move this mob mentality.
00:03:53.320 | And that happens with morale inside of a team.
00:03:56.840 | And you as a leader can't get caught up with the mob.
00:04:00.960 | You can't let that happen.
00:04:03.120 | You have to detach yourself from the mob mentally
00:04:06.040 | so that you don't get caught up
00:04:07.440 | in their emotions and their morale.
00:04:09.680 | Because if you get caught up in their emotions
00:04:11.760 | and you get caught up in their morale, you can't correct it.
00:04:15.640 | So we go out on a mission.
00:04:17.880 | The mission goes great.
00:04:19.760 | We get into a gunfight, kill a couple of bad guys,
00:04:22.920 | everyone's okay, high fives, everyone's feeling great.
00:04:26.120 | You come back to base,
00:04:27.520 | hey, we don't need to debrief, that was perfect.
00:04:29.480 | Hey, we don't need to get our gear maintained.
00:04:32.840 | We can just go to bed, we're awesome.
00:04:35.200 | That's when the leader has to say, oh, we've got the mob,
00:04:38.120 | and the mob is becoming slightly arrogant.
00:04:41.120 | Hey guys, real quick, that was a good op,
00:04:44.080 | but there's some things we could improve on.
00:04:45.360 | You got to bring that mob back
00:04:47.440 | and bring them back to center line.
00:04:49.440 | Same thing in the other direction.
00:04:50.920 | You go out on an operation, it doesn't go well.
00:04:52.800 | You go out on an operation, you take casualties.
00:04:54.960 | Now you come back to base, you see guys moping around,
00:04:58.120 | you see the spirit starting to break, and same thing.
00:05:01.680 | If you're part of that mob, you'll be with them,
00:05:05.840 | your morale will be breaking, your spirit will be breaking.
00:05:08.240 | You got to look at them and say, oh, I see what's happening.
00:05:10.360 | Hey guys, listen up.
00:05:12.640 | That was tough, didn't go the way we wanted it to go.
00:05:15.840 | We need to learn some lessons.
00:05:17.440 | Here's some things I can do better.
00:05:18.920 | What can we do better to make sure
00:05:20.220 | that that never happens again?
00:05:21.720 | What can we do to make sure we have the opportunity
00:05:25.360 | to go out and avenge our brother on the battlefield?
00:05:29.600 | What can we do to move this thing forward?
00:05:31.320 | So as a leader, when it comes to winning and losing,
00:05:34.240 | you're generally going to be the person
00:05:36.400 | countering what the mob mentality is.
00:05:38.600 | 'Cause when the mob starts winning,
00:05:40.600 | they want to keep winning and they might get arrogant.
00:05:43.520 | When the mob is losing, they might start to lose more
00:05:47.400 | because their attitude goes down the drain.
00:05:50.160 | So that's what you have to pay attention to
00:05:51.780 | from a leadership perspective.
00:05:53.240 | For me personally, I think,
00:05:59.220 | I know what I did when I lost guys was focus on,
00:06:06.200 | all right, we need to celebrate the life.
00:06:11.080 | We need to mourn the loss and then we need to go to work.
00:06:16.080 | We need to get our gear back on.
00:06:18.160 | We need to lock and load our weapons.
00:06:19.720 | We need to get back out there.
00:06:21.840 | I know that that's what we needed to do.
00:06:24.120 | So often, the best way to contend with problems,
00:06:31.960 | with issues, with adversity is action, is by taking action.
00:06:36.960 | The more you sit and the more you wait
00:06:41.680 | and the more time you spend with that adversity,
00:06:45.080 | with the upper hand inside your head,
00:06:47.640 | the worse it's going to get.
00:06:49.880 | So for me, always taking action, making something happen.
00:06:53.880 | It doesn't have to be huge.
00:06:55.480 | It doesn't have to be some mammoth triumph
00:07:00.160 | that you're going to go and pursue.
00:07:02.440 | But if you say, "Hey, listen, this is what happened.
00:07:06.560 | "Didn't go the way we wanted it to.
00:07:08.580 | "We're going to get our gear back on.
00:07:09.500 | "We're going to go back out.
00:07:10.460 | "We're going to do this other mission."
00:07:13.320 | And that's what I think.
00:07:14.880 | I think taking action, and it's in your personal life too.
00:07:18.240 | You know, something doesn't go the way you wanted it to go.
00:07:20.160 | You didn't get the job you wanted.
00:07:21.420 | You didn't get the hire.
00:07:22.260 | You didn't get the promotion.
00:07:23.640 | You can go home and sit there and dwell on it.
00:07:26.720 | That's not getting you any progress.
00:07:28.080 | Or you say, "Okay, you know what?
00:07:29.720 | "Let me do a quick analysis.
00:07:30.620 | "Why didn't I get that promotion?
00:07:31.800 | "Oh, it's 'cause I didn't get this qualification,
00:07:34.220 | "or I hadn't jumped through this gate.
00:07:37.740 | "Okay, cool.
00:07:38.580 | "What do I need?
00:07:39.400 | "Let me look into how do I get to jump through that gate
00:07:41.200 | "so next time I will get the promotion."
00:07:42.440 | And you start taking action.
00:07:43.920 | So action for me is a cure for a lot of problems
00:07:47.080 | that we have in life.
00:07:48.160 | (upbeat music)
00:07:51.580 | (upbeat music)
00:07:54.160 | (upbeat music)