When Jocko’s extensive leadership experience meets a take-action attitude, the outcome can only be phenomenal motivation. Throw in his consistent yet passionate, aggression and assertiveness and you’ve got one hell of a guy with a hell of a lot to say about the things that matter the most.
John Gretton “Jocko” Willink was born in Connecticut in 1971 and is an American retired United States Navy SEAL, podcaster and author. During his military service, he saw combat action during the war in Iraq and commanded the SEAL Team 3 Task Unit Bruiser. He retired from the military as a Lieutenant Commander with many awards including the Silver Star Medal and the Bronze Star.
Jocko’s military leadership and background afforded him the opportunity to speak and write about leadership and how his experiences can be translated into everyday life. His lessons focus the principles he learned as the Commander in the Battle of Ramadi.
His first and third books, Extreme Ownership – How Navy SEALS Land and Win and The Dichotomy of Leadership became New York Times bestsellers and were co-written with fellow and former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, Leif Babin. The two are now shared owners of leadership consulting company, Echelon Front which provides practical solutions to create high performance success in professional teams.
To publicise his book, Willink made appearances on the podcasts of Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan and Sam Harris. The experiences inspired him to start his own weekly podcast with Brazilian jiu jitsu practitioner Echo Charles, called the Jocko Podcast
He’s certainly proved to the world he is worth listening to as a master of discipline, ownership and leadership, which is why we’ve gathered his best lines for empowering anyone, to reach his level of success.
1. The leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything.
2. A leader must lead, but also be ready to follow. They must be aggressive, but not overbearing. A leader must be calm, but not robotic. They must be confident but never cocky. A leader must be brave, but not foolhardy. They must have a competitive spirit, but be a gracious loser.
3. Don’t expect to be motivated every day to get out there and make things happen. You won’t be. Don’t count on motivation. Count on Discipline.
4. While discipline and freedom seem like they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, they are actually very connected.
5. If frontline troops are unclear about the plan and yet are too intimidated to ask questions, the team’s ability to effectively execute the plan radically decreases.
6. The temptation to take the easy road is always there. It is as easy as staying in bed in the morning and sleeping in. But discipline is paramount to ultimate success and victory for any leader and any team.
7. Extreme Ownership is a mind-set, an attitude.
8. There are people in the world who have skills and strength and talent that I will never have. Never. These notions that you can ‘be whatever you want to be as long as you want it bad enough’ are not true. They are fairy tales.
9. There is only hard work, late nights, early mornings, practice, rehearsal, repetition, study, sweat, blood, toil, frustration, and discipline.
10. I had to take complete ownership of what went wrong. That is what a leader does — even if it means getting fired. If anyone was to be blamed and fired for what happened, let it be me.
11. If you continue to keep low performers on your team, that are actually dragging the team down; you’re failing the whole team, and eventually, the whole team is going to fail.
12. It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.
13. Put your leaders in stressful scenarios. Make them figure out solutions under pressure. See if you can make them frustrated, angry, and flustered, and then demand decisive leadership from them. They will be challenged at first, but they will get better over time.
14. Set your alarm clock and get out of bed when it goes off.
15. Overconfidence was risky in such a hostile environment, a mistake most often made by warriors who had never truly been tested.
16. Stop researching every aspect of it and reading all about it and debating the pros and cons of it … Start doing it.
17. What makes you a SEAL, what makes you a SEAL is being a good tactician on the battlefield, understanding how to shoot, move, and communicate, knowing small unit maneuver warfare.
18. Some of the boldest, most successful plans in history have not come from the senior ranks but from frontline leaders. Senior leaders simply had the courage to accept and run with them.
19. Waking up early was the first example I noticed in the SEAL Teams in which discipline was really the difference between being good and being exceptional.
20. Leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities, between one extreme and another.
21. You’re not going to find happiness. You have to make it. So get out there and make some happiness.
22. If I went back to my 20-year-old self, what I would tell my 20-year-old self is, ‘You don’t know anything.’ Because everyone, when they’re young, they think they know what’s going on in the world, and you don’t.
23. Human beings are generally not capable of managing more than six to ten people, particularly when things go sideways and inevitable contingencies arise.
24. Staying ahead of the curve prevents a leader from being overwhelmed when pressure is applied and enables greater decisiveness.
25. I know that somewhere out there, another man is also preparing. That man is the enemy.
26. Good leaders don’t make excuses. Instead, they figure out a way to get it done.
27. But my glory, it doesn’t happen in front of a crowd. It doesn’t happen in a stadium or on a stage. There are no medals handed out. It happens in the darkness of the early morning. In solitude. Where I try. And I try. And I try again. With everything I have, to be the best that I can possibly be.
28. When I was running training, we would fire a couple of leaders from every SEAL team because they couldn’t lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn’t a question of their ability – it was a question of their ability to listen.
29. How do you become better? There is only one way – The way of discipline.
30. If you allow the status quo to persist, you can’t expect to improve performance, and you can’t expect to win.
31. To implement real change, to drive people to accomplish something truly complex or difficult or dangerous — you can’t make people do these things. You have to lead them.
32. SEALs are human beings. We may all have the same haircuts, but we aren’t robots. Some SEALs are great people. Some are not great people. Some have done unspeakably terrible things. You’re dealing with different people, different dreams, different desires.
33. Don’t just think. Don’t just talk. Don’t just dream. None of that matters. The only thing that matters is that you actually do. So: DO.
34. The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people – their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself.
35. There can be no leadership when there is no team.
36. Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests.
37. Go down swinging. And I’ll tell you: If you fight with all you have, more often than not, you won’t go down at all. You will win.
38. One of the key qualities a leader must possess is the ability to detach from the chaos, mayhem, and emotions in a situation and make good, clear decisions based on what is actually happening.
39. That nice, soft pillow and the warm blanket, and it’s all comfortable, and no one wants to leave that comfort – but if you can wake up early in the morning, get a head start on everyone else that’s still sleeping, get productive time doing things that you need to do – that’s a huge piece to moving your life forward.
40. A good leader does not get bogged down in the minutia of a tactical problem at the expense of strategic success.
41. The more you practice, the better you get, the more freedom you have to create.
42. Leading people is the most challenging and, therefore, the most gratifying undertaking of all human endeavors.
43. Most of us aren’t defeated in one decisive battle. We are defeated one tiny, seemingly insignificant surrender at a time that chips away at who we should really be.
44. We learned that leadership requires belief in the mission and unyielding perseverance to achieve victory, particularly when doubters question whether victory is even possible.
45. Don’t fight stress. Embrace it. Turn it on itself. Use it to make yourself sharper and more alert. Use it to make you think and learn and get better and smarter and more effective. Use the stress to make you a better you.
46. The goal of all leaders should be to work themselves out of a job. When mentored and coached properly, the junior leader can eventually replace the senior leader, allowing the senior leader to move on to the next level of leadership.
47. They didn’t have to jump for joy at the thought of fighting alongside Iraqi soldiers on a dangerous battlefield. But they did have to understand why they were doing it so that they could believe in the mission.
48. Jiu-Jitsu is probably the No. 1 activity that I could recommend to someone to improve their lives overall.
49. Don’t think in the morning. That’s a big mistake that people make. They wake up in the morning and they start thinking. Don’t think. Just execute the plan. The plan is the alarm clock goes off, you get up, you go work out. Get some.
50. It is essential to develop a standardized planning process.
51. We all have a tendency to avoid our weaknesses. When we do that, we never progress or get any better.
52. A lot of times, people have something that they’re afraid of. They’ve got a client that’s mad at them. They’ve got a project that’s due. And they let that stress hang over their head. I don’t let that happen.
53. Once the wheels were in motion and the full resources of the team were engaged in that highest priority effort, I could then determine the next priority, focus the team’s efforts there, and then move on to the next priority.
54. A good leader has nothing to prove, but everything to prove.
55. Things won’t get better dwelling on the past. Accept what has happened. Then move forward.
56. Get creative. Get aggressive. Get it done. When you are on the road...stay on the path!
57. When setting expectations, no matter what has been said or written, if substandard performance is accepted and no one is held accountable — if there are no consequences — that poor performance becomes the new standard. Therefore, leaders must enforce standards.
58. When you think you can’t take any more… Guess what? You can – It’s proven by the stories of ordinary people in war.
59. In chaotic, dynamic, and rapidly changing environments, leaders at all levels must be empowered to make decisions. Decentralized Command is a key component to victory.
60. Just do some kind of workout. Doesn’t matter if it’s going for a walk around the block, going for a jog, doing some calisthenics, lifting weights, going to a pool and swimming – you name it. But do something that gets your blood flowing and gets your mind in the game.
61. The Darkness cannot extinguish your light. Your WILL. Your determination. No matter what is happening—no matter how hard the fight is. As long as you keep fighting—you win.
62. Didn’t get promoted? Good. More time to get better.
63. When your feelings are screaming that you have had enough when you think you are going to break emotionally, override that emotion with concrete logic and willpower that says one thing: I don’t stop.
64. Getting out of bed is like the foundation of the discipline, and I think it carries over into everything else.
65. When personal agendas become more important than the team and the overarching mission’s success, performance suffers and failure ensues.
66. Fear is normal. Every person feels fear at some point. Step aggressively towards your fear – that is the step into bravery.
67. All animals, including humans, need to see the connection between action and consequence in order to learn or react appropriately.
68. The only person you can control is you. So focus on making yourself who you want to be: Faster. Smarter. Stronger. More humble. Less ego.
69. I would venture to guess that the biggest reason creative types don’t produce isn’t because they don’t have vision… or talent… in most cases, it’s a lack of discipline.
70. Everyone wants some magic pill—some life hack—that eliminates the need to do the work. But that does not exist.
71. People who are successful decide they are going to be successful. They make that choice. They decide to study hard. They decide to work hard. They decide to be the first person to get to work and the last to go home.
72. I’m always reading the next book. Taking notes. Highlighting, researching, studying. It doesn’t stop.
