Jocko Podcast
I’ve recently been extracting extraordinary value from the Jocko Podcast.
Jocko Willink is a retired Navy SEAL commander, jiu-jitsu black belt, management consultant and, in my opinion, master rationalist. His podcast typically consists of detailed analysis of some book on military history or strategy followed by a hands-on Q&A session. Last week’s episode (#38) was particularly good and if you want to just dive in, I would start there.
As a sales pitch, I’ll briefly describe some of his recurring talking points:
Extreme ownership. Take ownership of all outcomes. If your superior gave you “bad orders”, you should have challenged the orders or adapted them better to the situation; if your subordinates failed to carry out a task, then it is your own instructions to them that were insufficient. If the failure is entirely your own, admit your mistake and humbly open yourself to feedback. By taking on this attitude you become a better leader and through modeling you promote greater ownership throughout your organization. I don’t think I have to point out the similarities between this and “Heroic Morality” we talk about around here.
Mental toughness and discipline. Jocko’s language around this topic is particularly refreshing, speaking as someone who has spent too much time around “self help” literature, in which I would partly include Less Wrong. His ideas are not particularly new, but it is valuable to have an example of somebody who reliably executes on his the philosophy of “Decide to do it, then do it.” If you find that you didn’t do it, then you didn’t truly decide to do it. In any case, your own choice or lack thereof is the only factor. “Discipline is freedom.” If you adopt this habit as your reality, it become true.
Decentralized command. This refers specifically to his leadership philosophy. Every subordinate needs to truly understand the leader’s intent in order to execute instructions in a creative and adaptable way. Individuals within a structure need to understand the high-level goals well enough to be able to act in a almost all situations without consulting their superiors. This tightens the OODA loop on an organizational level.
Leadership as manipulation. Perhaps the greatest surprise to me was the subtlety of Jocko’s thinking about leadership, probably because I brought in many erroneous assumptions about the nature of a SEAL commander. Jocko talks constantly about using self-awareness, detachment from one’s ideas, control of one’s own emotions, awareness of how one is perceived, and perspective-taking of one’s subordinates and superiors. He comes off more as HPMOR!Quirrell than as a “drill sergeant”.
The Q&A sessions, in which he answers questions asked by his fans on Twitter, tend to be very valuable. It’s one thing to read the bullet points above, nod your head and say, “That sounds good.” It’s another to have Jocko walk through the tactical implementation of this ideas in a wide variety of daily situations, ranging from parenting difficulties to office misunderstandings.
For a taste of Jocko, maybe start with his appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast or the Sam Harris podcast.
Will check out, sounds like I would like it.
Extreme ownership is also great for confidence. Healthy extreme ownership looks like a person who does something about their situation instead of complaining about it, it doesn’t mean to endure toxic situations because it’s your fault. If you’re in an abusive relationship confronting the abuser or leaving the relationship is ownership. Accepting the abuse because it’s “your fault” is not ownership. Sorry if very obvious advice, but I would imagine there are people-pleasers here that would take this extreme ownership advice detrimentally.
One cool thing about the podcast format is that hearing a person tell a story about their own life that exhibits a principle makes that principle so much clearer than the mere abstract statement of the principle.
I listened to ep.38 and you were pretty accurate in your descriptions. These podcasts are long but a fun listen if you have the time.
Just an observation, the military tribe definitely takes the cake when it comes to pointing out non-tribe members. They always use the term civilians, in a way that irks me slightly. “In the military we learned X” is different than “see what civilians don’t know is that we in the military learned X”. I love watching numberphile videos, because they dumb down math and make it interesting for a person like me, but it would get old real quick if all the mathematicians kept referring to us as “non-mathematician” or “civilians”.
I always find the perspective of high-level military figures quite refreshing and almost always a lot rational. After all, nowhere the rubber meets the road more than in war situations, and I guess that those who survive and thrive in such environments are those who master in seeing things as they really are and reason correctly about them.
It’s possible I’m getting to confused with the language here but I’ve struggled to apply this advice in my own life. I’ll decide that I’m not going to snack at work anymore and then find myself snacking anyway once the time comes. It seems to reflect a naivete in regards to how willpower and habits work.
It sounds good and I’ve listened to 4 episodes now and Jocko doesn’t seem to elaborate on how exactly this process is supposed to work. What is the difference between deciding and truly deciding? What is the habit of ‘discipline is freedom’ and how does one adopt it as their reality?
I come away from the podcast inspired for a few hours but with no lasting change.
“Discipline is freedom” summarizes the attitude that if you have trained yourself to wake up early, stay on task, exercise regularly, etc., etc., then you now have the freedom to do a variety of things that you would not otherwise be able to do. By having the discipline to exercise, you now have the ability to freely use a more fit body, by waking up early, you have extra hours at your disposal, and so on.
To address your first question, I think Jocko would probably say: “If you form an intention to do something, and you don’t do it, then you are mentally weak. The first thing to do is then to decide not to be mentally weak.”
In abstruse lesswrongspeak, this would like something like: “It is most important to form a self-governing narrative of the form ‘a mentally strong person would execute on their intentions regardless of transient impulses or mental resistance, and I commit with utmost resolution to being a mentally strong person’. Then you must continuously monitor your daily activities for adherence to this commitment and to this narrative-mentality.”
Ironically, the Less Wrong deconstructionist approach of breaking the self up into multiple agents and carefully finding a minimum-enthalpy path through wantspace is itself antithetical to forming such a “simplistic” self-governing narrative, even if possessing and maintaining such a narrative were more effective.
This is after all mirrored in psychological literature in the models of willpower as a finite or an infinite resource.
Although the simple “I decide I won’t have akrasia, so I won’t” is doomed to fail, the meta-focus is interesting and likely to be productive:
What would it take to be a disciplined person?
Which transformation in my environment can I enact so that I become more disciplined?
How can I construct a positive feedback loop of acting on my decisions?
And so on...
So,
Make the decision and strongly commit to being a mentally strong person
Continuously monitor your actions to ensure they are the actions of a mentally strong person
Maintain this (for weeks/months/years?) until a new self-identity is formed.
If I’ve misrepresented something point it out, but this looks to me like a recipe for failure. It’s missing fundamental parts of the human experience. People most often fail at their goals because of conflicting short and long term desires, forgetfulness and existing habits. Jocko doesn’t adequately take that into account. Making a decision is useful—you start preparing for the new challenge, (e.g. If I’m going to wake up at 5AM I better get breakfast ready the night before...) and there’ll be some self consistency effect with the newly formed intention. There’s two obvious problems,
a) It’s massively mentally energy intensive. It’s hard to choose the kale over the donut or work over reddit. Temptations don’t disappear after you’ve decided not to pursue them. You have to decide over and over again throughout the day not to chase them. Decision fatigue is a thing.
b) Humans forget. Anyone that has done any meditation will be familiar with the experience of not being able to sustain attention on an object for more than a few moments despite the most earnest effort. Even if we didn’t have all the other things we need to think about every day to occupy our minds, maintaining consistent attention is an impossible goal.
Jocko’s framing that discipline is a decision represents an incremental improvement over Nike’s ‘Just do It’.
I definitely don’t think Jocko’s material on “how to get things done” is his strongest suit, and I don’t think he intends it to be really.
I would say that temptations do disappear if you successfully implement a mindset of “it’s really not an option”, but again, the implementation of that mindset in the first place is tricky.
Honestly I think one of the benefits of being in the military, at least for a certain type of person, is that the military provides a supporting framework and incentive structure for building good habits. You work out every day because it’s part of your job, basically. You put yourself through all kinds of physical deprivation because you have to, it’s required, you’re not making yourself do it, you’re being ordered to do it. For the same reason, professional athletes don’t have to badger themselves to go to the gym—going to the gym is aligned with their other goals. For people like me, going to the gym is a distraction from my other goals.
I think too this is the main weak point.
The distinction between ‘discipline’ and ‘true discipline’ is just semantics for ‘willpower when it works and when it doesn’t’.
Here is a method I use to good effect:
1) Take a detailed look at the pros and cons of what you want to change. This is sometimes sufficient by itself—more than once I have realized I simply get nothing out what I’m doing, and the desire goes away by itself.
2) Find a substitution for those pros.
Alternatively, think about an example of when you decided to do something and then actually did it, and try to port the methods over. Personal example: I recently had a low-grade freakout over deciding to do a particular paperwork process that is famously slow and awful, and brings up many deeply negative feelings for me. Then I was cleaning my dutch oven, and reflected on getting a warranty replacement actually took about three months and several phone calls, which is frustrating but perfectly manageable. This gives me confidence that monitoring a slow administrative process is achievable, and I am more likely to complete it now.
To balance the criticism with some praise, in addition to some of the great things you have mentioned, there are two worthwhile things about the Jocko podcast that are not explicit in your post that I want to highlight.
1) Jocko embodies growth mindset.
2) Much of Jocko’s discipline comes because he has trained to become comfortable experiencing discomfort. Once you’ve done many painful things your fear of them falls and your sense of self-efficacy rises making it easier complete future painful goals.