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Jocko Willink: How to Become Resilient, Forge Your Identity & Lead Others

Huberman Lab

CHAPTER

What Kind of People Do You Think the Military Attracts?

When you're 14, what I'm going to do tomorrow is basically future operations. And the more I focused on doing things that are going to positively impact my future, the better my life became. There's an interesting lesson in this idea of who is attracted to the military. Is it like people who want to instill order on themselves? Or is it people wanting to instillorder on other people or both?

00:00
Speaker 1
When you're 14,
Speaker 2
you're thinking, Hey, what I'm going to do tomorrow, that's basically future operations are what I'm going to do tomorrow. I was like, where's where am I going to get the slurpee? Which curves am I going to hit skateboarding? And where we can play video games tonight? Or what girls are we going to hang out with? That was kind of the mindset for you. Yeah. And then at some point you you learned and so did
Speaker 1
I. Oh, the way the the actions that I take now are either going to positively impact my future or they're going to negatively impact my future. And the more I focused on doing things that are going to positively impact my future, the better my life became. And I think that's a very huge lesson to learn that I know I didn't figure out for quite some time. Yeah, the idea
Speaker 2
of investments and withdrawals or understanding that early in life in terms of health behaviors and intellectual behaviors. And your point about the military is a really interesting one. I never thought about the military that way that there's this blank slate when you get in there. And before we started, we were talking a little bit about the kinds of mindsets and people that the military attracts. And I'd love for you to elaborate on that again. You mentioned something interesting, this notion of garrison. Interesting word in its own right. What kind of people do you think the military attracts? And then within the military, do you start to see some kind of predictable bifurcations where certain people go down one track and other people go down another? I have a few friends from the SEAL teams as we both know. And I've heard sometimes about the distinction between officers and enlisted guys, this kind of thing. But maybe this question I'm asking is more across the board for all of military. And for really for people listening, whether or not they are interested in military or not for their own for their own life. I think there's an interesting lesson in this idea of who is attracted to the military. Is it like people who want to instill order on themselves? Or is it people want to instill order on other people or both? Yeah, there's a there's a really
Speaker 1
good book. And I did it. I ended up doing about four podcasts on this book, which is called the psychology of military incompetence. When I first saw that amazing title, I know. And when I first saw that title, I thought to myself, Oh, you know, this is some some academic that's going to look at the military and bash it. And but I did a little research and it turned out that the guy that had written the book, I can't think of his name right now, he was a guy that had served in World War II was wounded. I mean, this guy had this guy understood what he was talking about. And it's really an obvious concept. And when you think about it, and his basic the basic premise is this, the military, when you look at it from the outside, it's this orderly place. It's a place where everything has a place. It's a place where if you have a certain rank on your shoulder, you will command respect and people have to listen to you. That's what it looks like. So it's an attractive place for people that have an authoritarian mindset for people that want to just, Hey, don't, don't, don't question what I'm saying. Just shut up and do what I tell you to do. There's people that love that. There's people that want to live like that. You've worked for them. I've worked for them. We've we've experienced that those type of people throughout our lives, that authoritarian mindset that just want to bark orders and have people listen to them. And so when they when those people are 14 years old or 16 years old or 18 years old, they look at the military and they see a uniform and they say people saluting and they see orders being carried out and they think that's where I'm going to go. And I can get the respect that I deserve. And the military certainly attracts people like that. And those people that have that highly disciplined and orderly mindset can do well inside the military, especially in Garrison. And I had to, again, we were talking about this earlier, the word Garrison, I don't think there's a civilian equivalent to this word, but it basically means the non combat situation. So when you're out on the parade field, when you're when you're going through schooling, where there's no combat involved, when you're marching, like those kinds of things, we call that Garrison. It's in the rear. It's not in combat. And the people with an authoritarian mindset actually do pretty well in Garrison's situations. Why? Because things are orderly. And you can predict what's going to happen. And you do get a certain issue of gear. And that gear is going to be delivered on time.

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