Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  On July 4, 2016, I texted Jocko to thank him for his service. We exchanged hellos, and I asked him how he and his family were doing. He responded: “All good here. With the exception of the book I’m reading about the My Lai massacre. What a nightmare. Thankful for what we have. . . .”

  All of the interviewees in this book have methods for achievement. Most who’ve been successful for decades also have methods to cultivate gratitude. Remembering his friends who made the ultimate sacrifice in war, Jocko is truly grateful for every sunrise, every smile, every laugh, every breath. He also deliberately and regularly exposes himself to the stories of those who have been subjected to horror, misfortune, and darkness. If you’re open to reading a “dark” book to help put things in perspective, If This Is a Man and The Truce (often combined into one volume) by Primo Levi are two of my favorites. They were recommended to me by the illusionist David Blaine, who has Levi’s concentration camp number tattooed on his arm. When I asked him, “What did you learn from the book?” he answered: “Everything.”

  If You Want to Be Tougher, Be Tougher

  “If you want to be tougher mentally, it is simple: Be tougher. Don’t meditate on it.” These words of Jocko’s helped one listener—a drug addict—get sober after many failed attempts. The simple logic struck a chord: “Being tougher” was, more than anything, a decision to be tougher. It’s possible to immediately “be tougher,” starting with your next decision. Have trouble saying “no” to dessert? Be tougher. Make that your starting decision. Feeling winded? Take the stairs anyway. Ditto. It doesn’t matter how small or big you start. If you want to be tougher, be tougher.

  “Take Extreme Ownership of Your World”

  While Jocko was a SEAL Task Unit commander, the SEAL Commodore, who led all SEALs on the west coast, would hold meetings with all the Task Unit commanders to assess the needs and problems of the troops, then marshal resources to help them:

  “[The SEAL Commodore] would go around the room, because he wants to get direct feedback from the frontline leaders. These guys are my peers. He’d ask one of the leaders, ‘What do you need?’ and the leader would say, ‘Well, the boots that we have are okay in the hot weather, but we’re getting ready to be in a cooler environment. We need new boots, and we need them this week before our next training block.’ The Commodore would reply, ‘Okay, got it.’ Then he’d ask the next person, who’d say, ‘When we’re out at the desert training facility and there’s no Internet, our guys are disconnected. We really need to get WiFi out there.’ ‘Okay, got it.’ The next guy would say, ‘We need more helicopter training support, because we don’t feel like we’re working around helicopters enough. We really need that.’ The Commodore would agree to take care of that as well. Eventually, he’d get to me.

  “The Commodore would say: ‘Jocko, what do you need?’ and I would say, ‘We’re good, sir.’ The implication is obvious: If I have problems, I’m going to handle them. I’m going to take care of them, and I’m not going to complain. I took extreme ownership of my world. The way that worked was twofold. When I did need something, it was something significant, it was something real. And when I told the Commodore, ‘Hey, boss, we need this right here,’ I would get it almost instantaneously because he knew that I really, truly needed it.

  “You can’t blame your boss for not giving you the support you need. Plenty of people will say, ‘It’s my boss’s fault.’ No, it’s actually your fault because you haven’t educated him, you haven’t influenced him, you haven’t explained to him in a manner he understands why you need this support that you need. That’s extreme ownership. Own it all.”

  A Good Reason to Be an Early Riser

  “I’m up and getting after it by 4:45. I like to have that psychological win over the enemy. For me, when I wake up in the morning—and I don’t know why—I’m thinking about the enemy and what they’re doing. I know I’m not on active duty anymore, but it’s still in my head: that there’s a guy in a cave somewhere, he’s rocking back and forth, and he’s got a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other. He’s waiting for me, and we’re going to meet. When I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking to myself: What can I do to be ready for that moment, which is coming? That propels me out of bed.”

  TF: This story has compelled so many listeners to start waking early that there is a #0445club hashtag on Twitter, featuring pictures of wristwatches. It’s still going strong more than a year after the podcast.

  Pomegranate White Tea and Beyond

  Jocko drinks no coffee and next-to-no caffeine. His one indulgence is occasional pomegranate white tea (“. . . which I believe hits your soul pretty well”). But . . .

  “[During] my first deployment to Iraq, we did longer patrols in the vehicles, and I would have—in a series of pouches hanging in front of my seat—a flashbang grenade and then another flashbang grenade, and then a frag grenade, which is the grenade that kills people, and then another frag grenade. And then, the next three pouches were Red Bull, Red Bull, Red Bull.”

  TIM: “But you’re an intense guy, which is meant as a compliment. What are you like on three Red Bulls?”

  JOCKO: “More Jocko.”

  TF: Jocko doesn’t want to need caffeine. On a similar note, another SEAL friend who regularly eats only one meal per day sent me the following: “I think it’s hilarious when some [special operations] guys get grumpy if they don’t have protein powder every 2 hours. I have a huge advantage if I can turn anything into fuel, including garbage, or go without food.”

  What Makes a Good Commander?

  “The immediate answer that comes to mind is ‘humility.’ Because you’ve got to be humble, and you’ve got to be coachable. . . . Later, when I was running training, we would fire a couple leaders from every SEAL Team because they couldn’t lead. And 99.9% of the time, it wasn’t a question of their ability to shoot a weapon, it wasn’t because they weren’t in good physical shape, it wasn’t because they were unsafe. It was almost always a question of their ability to listen, open their mind, and see that, maybe, there’s a better way to do things. That is from a lack of humility. . . .

  “We put these guys through very realistic and challenging training, to say the least. If there are any guys who went through training when I was running it, right now they’re chuckling because it was very realistic. In fact, it was borderline psychotic. We put so much pressure on these guys and overwhelmed them. A good leader would come back and say [something like one of the following], ‘I lost it, I didn’t control it. I didn’t do a good job. I didn’t see what was happening. I got too absorbed in this little tiny tactical situation that was right in front of me.’ Either they’d make those criticisms about themselves, or they’d ask, ‘What did I do wrong?’ And when you told them, they’d nod their head, pull out their notebook, and take notes. That right there, that’s a guy who’s going to make it, who’s going to get it right. The arrogant guys, who lacked humility, they couldn’t take criticism from others—and couldn’t even do an honest self-assessment because they thought they already knew everything. Stay humble or get humbled.”

  On the Importance of Detachment

  “I was probably 20 or 21 years old. I was in my first SEAL platoon. We’re on an oil rig in California doing training. We’d come up on this level of this oil rig, and we’ve never been on an oil rig before. There’s gear and boxes and stuff everywhere on these levels, and you can see through the floors because they are steel grating—not solid material. It’s a complex environment. So, we come up, and we all get on this platform and, because of the complexity, everybody freezes.

  “I’m kind of waiting. I’m a new guy, so I don’t really feel like I should be doing anything. But then I said to myself, ‘Somebody’s got to do something,’ so I just did what’s called ‘high port’ with my gun: I pointed my gun up toward the air [to indicate] ‘I’m not a shooter right now.’ I took one step back off the line, looked around, and I saw what the
picture was.

  “Then I said, ‘Hold left, move right.’ Everybody heard it, and they did it. And I said to myself, ‘Hmmm . . . that’s what you need to do: step back and observe.’ I realized that detaching yourself from the situation, so you can see what’s happening, is absolutely critical. Now, when I talk to executives or mid-level managers, I explain to them that I’m doing that all the time.

  “It sounds horrible, but it’s almost like, sometimes, I’m not a participant in my own life. I’m an observer of that guy who’s doing it. So, if I’m having a conversation with you and we’re trying to discuss a point, I’m watching and saying [to myself], ‘Wait, am I being too emotional right now? Wait a second, look at him. What is his reaction?’ Because I’m not reading you correctly if I’m seeing you through my own emotion or ego. I can’t really see what you’re thinking if I’m emotional. But if I step out of that, now I can see the real you and assess if you are getting angry, or if your ego is getting hurt, or if you’re about to cave because you’re just fed up with me. Whereas, if I’m raging in my own head, I might miss all of that. So being able to detach as a leader is critical.”

  ✸ Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”?

  “The first people who come to mind are the real heroes of Task Unit Bruiser: Marc Lee, first SEAL killed in Iraq. Mike Monsoor, second SEAL killed in Iraq, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor after he jumped on a grenade to save three of our other teammates. And finally, Ryan Job, one of my guys [who was] gravely wounded in Iraq, blinded in both eyes, but who made it back to America, was medically retired from the Navy, but who died from complications after the 22nd surgery to repair his wounds. Those guys, those men, those heroes, they lived, and fought, and died like warriors.”

  ✸ Most-gifted or recommended books?

  “I think there’s only one book that I’ve ever given and I’ve only given it to a couple people. That’s a book called About Face, by Colonel David H. Hackworth. The other book that I’ve read multiple times is Blood Meridian [by Cormac McCarthy].”

  ✸ Favorite documentaries?

  “Restrepo, which I’m sure you’ve seen. [TF: This was co-produced and co-filmed by Sebastian Junger, the next profile.] There is also an hour-long program called ‘A Chance in Hell: The Battle for Ramadi.’”

  Quick Takes

  ✸ You walk into a bar. What do you order from the bartender?

  “Water.”

  ✸ What does your diet generally look like?

  “It generally looks like steak.”

  ✸ What kind of music does Jocko listen to?

  Two samples:

  For workouts—Black Flag, My War, side B

  In general—White Buffalo

  Behind the Scenes

  Peter Attia (page 59) introduced me to Jocko. I once witnessed Peter interview Jocko on stage. Peter said to the crowd, “Jocko can do 70 strict pull-ups . . .” and Jocko quickly interjected with, “No, I can’t do 70 pull-ups. I can do 67.”

  Jocko is a big fan of the Hardcore History podcast, hosted by Dan Carlin (page 285), as am I.

  When Jocko slept at my house following our interview, my then-girlfriend woke me up the next morning at 8 a.m. with “Ummm . . . I think he’s been up reading for 5 hours already. What should I do?”

  The only time I’ve seen Jocko’s eyes bug out was when I told him that I first learned to swim in my 30s. He texted me the following while I was working on this chapter: “Thanks for putting me in this book. . . . One day I will repay you, oddly enough, by tying your feet together and your hands behind your back and making you swim/survive.”

  Trying to Get Jocko’s Spirit Animal

  I gave this a good college try. It went on for a while. The closest I got was Jocko’s wife’s suggestion. She felt like his spirit animal would probably resemble Motörhead’s Snaggletooth logo (worth Googling). Here’s part of our text exchange:

  * * *

  Sebastian Junger

  Sebastian Junger (TW: @sebastianjunger, sebastianjunger.com) is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, and Tribe. As an award-winning journalist, he has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film, Restrepo, co-directed with Tim Hetherington, was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Restrepo, which chronicles the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, is widely considered to have broken new ground in war reporting. Junger has since produced and directed three additional documentaries about war and its aftermath.

  “How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?”

  Elaboration: “In terms of our communities and our society at home, we [thankfully] no longer have to organize young men and prepare them for group violence so that we can survive. That’s been the human norm for 2 million years, either from predators or from other humans. . . . If you don’t give young men a good and useful group to belong to, they will create a bad group to belong to. But one way or another, they’re going to create a group, and they’re going to find something, an adversary, where they can demonstrate their prowess and their unity.”

  The Calming Effect of Acting Instead of Waiting

  “The special forces guys were the opposite [of those in the non-elite divisions]. As soon as they heard they were about to experience an overwhelming attack, their cortisol levels dropped. They got super calm. The reason their cortisol levels dropped was because it was stressful for them to wait for the unknown, but as soon as they knew they were going to be attacked, they had a plan of action. They started filling sandbags. They started cleaning their rifles. They started stockpiling their ammo, getting the plasma bags ready, whatever they do before an attack. All of that busyness gave them a sense of mastery and control that actually made them feel less anxious than just waiting around on an average day in a dangerous place.”

  The Upside of Disaster

  “What’s very fortunate, beautiful, wonderful, and also, in a weird way, tragic about modern society, is that crisis has been removed. When you reintroduce a crisis like in the Blitz in London or an earthquake that I wrote about in Avezzano, Italy, early in the 20th century, [things change]. In Avezzano, something like 95% of the population was killed. I’m going from memory, but unbelievable casualty, just like a nuclear strike. . . . People had to rely on each other, so everyone—upper-class people, lower-class people, peasants, and nobility—sort of crouched around the same campfires. One of the survivors said, ‘The earthquake gave us what the law promises but does not, in fact, deliver, which is the equality of all men.’”

  “That feeling of ‘us,’ it buffers many people from their psychological demons.”

  —Sebastian discussing why unifying disasters and crisis, like 9/11 or the World War II Blitz bombings on London, often results in dramatic decreases in suicide, violent crime, mental illness symptoms, etc.

  The Point of Journalism Is the Truth

  “The point of journalism is the truth. The point of journalism is not to improve society. There are things, there are facts, there are truths that actually feel regressive, but it doesn’t matter, because the point of journalism isn’t to make everything better. It’s to give people accurate information about how things are.”

  On Most “Writer’s Block” in NonFiction

  “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words, [but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition. . . . I don’t have the goods. I have not gone into the world and brought back the goods that I’m writing about, and you never want to solve a research problem with language. You never want to . . . thread the needle and get through a thin patch in your research just because you’re such a prose artist.”

  Don’t Use Verbal Crutches

  “God, I re
ally dislike laziness. . . . There are these clichés like ‘the mortar slammed into the hillside.’ I just don’t want to read that again. Say it in an original way or don’t say it. You’re wasting everybody’s time, including your own, if you rely on these sorts of linguistic tropes.”

  His Message at a High School Commencement

  “You guys are programmed to succeed. The hardest thing you’re ever going to do in your life is fail at something, and if you don’t start failing at things, you will not live a full life. You’ll be living a cautious life on a path that you know is pretty much guaranteed to more or less work. That’s not getting the most out of this amazing world we live in. You have to do the hardest thing that you have not been prepared for in this school or any school: You have to be prepared to fail. That’s how you’re going to expand yourself and grow. As you work through that process of failure and learning, you will really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.”

  ✸ What advice would you give your younger self?

  “I would say to myself, ‘The public is not a threat.’ When you realize that we all need each other, and that we can all learn from each other, your stage fright goes away.”

  ✸ What would your 70-year-old self advise your current self?

  “The world is this continually unfolding set of possibilities and opportunities, and the tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things—the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying—and getting the ratio right is very hard. I think my 70-year-old self would say: ‘Be careful that you don’t err on one side or the other, because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are.’”