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

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Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, [music] where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. >> [music] >> I’m Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Jocko Willink. Jocko Willink, welcome. >> Thanks for having me, man.

In my view, and I think in the view of a lot of people, you embody discipline. So, today I definitely want to talk about routines, but also mindsets, but also things that you do and ways that you approach things that might not contradict, but not be so obvious to people. Might um be a little bit counterintuitive. There are generators and projectors. And generators are people that are just from a very young age, they realize they can impact other people.

They want to create things in the world. And then there are these projectors that like to just kind of reflect on what they see. And it’s not that generators are good and projectors are bad. The world needs both. That they really work in a kind of symbiotic way.

But your story captures the essence of what it is to be a generator, which is that by doing certain things you can have an impact and it feeds back to you and it’s likely that they receive something from it as well. >> Yeah, and where this all came to fruition, as I as I now piece together as you’re talking through this stuff. Look, when I joined the military, you join the military and you get a blank slate. No one cares what you got on the SATs or the No one cares about anything. You’re a blank slate.

And then with that blank slate, it is, “Hey, if you do this thing, if you perform this task and you perform it well, you will get recognition. You will hopefully get more control over your own destiny. ” Which is the ultimate in compensation for for human beings, to have more control over your own destiny. You can have all the money in the world, but if you don’t control what you’re doing every day, or at least you don’t control most of what you’re doing, then it’s then it’s not worth it. The reason people try and make money is so they can have more autonomy in their life.

And so in the military, it became very clear to me very quickly that if I performed well, I actually got a lot more freedom with what I did. That’s when I started to realize, “Oh, what I’m doing right now is going to impact not only what’s going to happen to me in the next hour, but in the next 2 years, 3 years, 5 years. ” 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. >> I get the impression, and I think everyone gets the impression, that you’re somebody with a lot of energy.

And I wonder whether or not you wake up with a lot of energy, and you feel like you have to burn it off with this physical activity and and work and other demands in your life, or do you find that you wake up and your energy is kind of neutral, and exercise and physical activity gives you energy? >> I would say it’s both, right? There’s no way I can sit here and say, “Oh, yeah, every day that alarm clock goes off, and I’m like, oh, yeah, let’s rock and roll. ” That certainly that’s not the case. It’s also certainly not the case that every day I’m like, “Oh, god, not again.

” No. Uh I’d say most of the time the alarm clock goes off, and I I I don’t think a bunch. Like when my alarm clock goes off, I I don’t debate with myself. I’m not negotiating. I I just the thing goes off, and I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.

Sort of robotic. Now, I this this much I can say. When you go and work out, you’re going to feel better. You will get energy from working out. You go break a sweat, you’re going to feel better.

That’s you’re going to get more energy from it. And look, you got to go really, really hard to where now you feel more tired when you’re done. And even that, I mean, you got to go psycho. I’ll do that occasionally, but I don’t do that on a daily basis. You know, at the end of a day, if I wake up, lift, run, surf, and then I do jiu-jitsu in the afternoon, like at the end of that day, I’m tired.

And I feel tired. Uh but normal day, working out just makes you feel better. Get definitely gives you a definitely gives me energy. The idea that movement and exercise gives us energy, I think is an important idea, and it’s something that I was frankly, I was hoping your answer would be that, as opposed to that, you know, you wake up every day and you just want to just attack the world because you have so much energy getting out of bed, because frankly, I never feel that way. But I always feel better after I train.

Do you nourish after you train, or do you find that eating slows you down? I find that eating slows me down. So, no, I don’t eat a big meal until I’m kind of done with the physical stuff for the day, which is usually at night, 6:00, 7:00 at night. Which I guess there’s some bad things about that. I eat too late.

Well, the data say, you know, if you’re having a regular meal schedule that allows you to sleep well at night, whatever that means for you, and that allows you to be active and focused when you need to be active and focused, that’s the ideal schedule. When I’m working with clients, like so, I have a leadership consulting company, Echelon Front. When I’m going to work with a client, I’m not eating. I cuz I cuz they’re going to be asking me questions. We’re going to be diving into what’s happening inside their business.

Like, there’s a lot of stuff going on. It’s a lot of cognitive work. Podcast, I’m not eating before a podcast. Before I’m recording a podcast, I’m not eating cuz I don’t want to have a bunch of food in my stomach. I want to You you you get a certain level of mental clarity when you haven’t eaten a bunch of food.

So, going out on missions, I never would eat before I go out out on a mission. I would eat when I come home. You know, you get home 4:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning from doing operation, cool, then I’ll eat. Cuz then I’m going to do a debrief for 15 minutes, clean weapons, and then eat a big meal, go to sleep. Cool.

Yeah, I don’t want to have food in my stomach when I’ve got to perform or execute anything. >> So much of what you embody and what you do, I think, centers around this idea of discipline, of course, but also energy. It’s the intuitive sense I get about why people are so drawn to your messaging and what you do and how you do it. Are there certain forms of exercise, like weightlifting versus cardio, that you find give you an especially big boost in what we’re calling energy? And here, this could be cognitive energy, it could be physical energy, but a readiness for the next thing.

I would have to say like the the high-intensity sort of anaerobic blast, you know, whether it’s on the bike or on the rower or, you know, swinging a kettlebell hard, something like that. That last 10-15 minutes, that’s a really good way to, you know, peak my mentality for the day. >> When you were in the teams, what was your observation about how winning and losing would impact people in the short and long term? From the perspective of leadership and maybe more importantly from the perspective of yourself, how do you work with that? How do you calibrate wins and losses?

How do you transmute losses into energy? Because wins, we know, convert to energy, but losses often times can sap our energy way, way down. >> To start with, I think that the selection process to get into the SEAL teams is going to weed out a bunch of people that can’t recover very quickly from something bad. The kid that was the star of the football team, the star of the basketball