John Ballen
speaker
344 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
John Ballen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
short sort of weird looking guys that don't in any way embody like what you would think of as like i mean some guys do some guys are unbelievable studs but it's like a ragtag group of guys that just didn't quit and a lot of it is because they had some sort of chip on their shoulder that internally drove them and it allowed them to persevere when things got so bad because things get so bad in butts
I mean, not just to like shamelessly cycle back to this idea of responsibility, but I'm going to do that. Before, when I first got to the basement, I've just arrived, I was really not even able to see what a mess I had made of my life. It wasn't like I knew I had screwed up and was blaming other people. It was more like my default setting was this is somebody else's fault.
Somebody did this to me. Like I actively remember being furious with my mom and dad for making me withdraw from college when I literally was about to get expelled. I had a terrible GPA. I couldn't afford to live in the dorms. I had shown no respect. there was no evidence to suggest I would succeed in college.
It wasn't until I was like home in the basement and the sort of like living in my mom's basement with no direction that I just sort of naturally happened. I was like, wait a minute, it's you. It's not them. It's you. And it seems so obvious now, but it took falling to the bottom. And also, by the way, kudos to my mom, because she's a single mom.
She didn't give an F. She was not like, don't worry, you'll figure it out. She was like, no, you're going to get a job. Or you're going to move out or whatever. And you're also going to pay rent while you're here. And that's it. Like this is your fault. And at first I'm mad. But it's sort of like it became this arduous thing I had to overcome.
So it was like no self-awareness, none, and genuinely blaming the world for my problems to like probably, if anything, an extreme on the other side where like if you haven't already noticed, I'm talking about the CS gas thing that I mentioned to you earlier.
That's something that if that happened to other people, I don't know if they'd talk about it on such a public platform, especially just in the SEAL community. Like reputation is such a big thing that even talking about things that other people know about but that cast you in sort of a bad light reputationally, I think people would stay away from saying that. But for me, I view it as a strength.
to highlight not only the things that I'm good at, but the things that I've made a mess of and screwed up because it shows other people that I'm secure. So it's like ultra self-aware and secure in my image, the opposite as the basement kid. And it took basically falling to the bottom, being home, no new opportunities in front of me.
Other people are off at college succeeding and here I am in my mom's basement for it to sink in that like, if you want to fix this, you have to start with saying it's my fault and then do something about it.
I've never heard that. That's actually a great quote.
Well, I think that part of the reason, or I should say this is more of a general statement that kind of answers this, I, in a way, was fortunate because when I hit rock bottom, I am a person that does not have, what is it called, paralysis by analysis. I'm sort of an impulsive person, for better or worse. And so for me, it's like once I hit that rock bottom,
it wasn't hard for me to sort of quickly find a good North Star, which the first one was college. I'm going to do college, right? And then when I was nearing the end of college, by this point, I've sort of righted the ship at this point, but I wanted a new goal. It was like, oh, SEAL training. That checks some boxes. It's like, I want to serve. Check. Like, it's a super hard goal. Check.
I'll have to work for it. Like, it offers me a chance at reinvention and rebirth. Check. Okay, good. Like, I jumped to that. That's what I do. I think there are plenty of people, and this is my guess, I don't know if it's true, who maybe have already hit rock bottom and they want to make a change. They know it's their fault or whatever situation that they know they've contributed to it.
But they don't know what to do next. And there's so many choices. Think about it. If you're at rock bottom, in some ways, you have every choice in the world to make. And I think that one of the things that I certainly preach when I talk about this at all, which I guess is in situations like this, is you don't need like a perfect idea.
You just need something that checks enough boxes for you to be worth doing. So for me, it was like, okay, I'm in my mom's basement. I've done this to myself. I am the reason I'm not at school. I'm the reason that like my parents are embarrassed about their son. It's my fault. What do I need to do? Okay, well, I should graduate school because that demonstrates that what happened at UMass is fixable.
I can graduate school. I can do it. I'm not dumb. I can do that. Okay, fine. Gotta go to school. That was it. It's like, it checks a box, so do it.
What if it's the wrong decision or something?
Yeah. I mean, and also you gotta figure it's sort of like a self-perpetuating problem too, where if you, let's say you've hit rock bottom, even if you don't know it and you're like, oh, I want to fix my life. I want to do something with my life. Let's say the kind of generic rock bottom.
Well, let's say you get paralysis by analysis and you're not able to sort of like pick a path and you go nowhere. That only reinforces the idea that you screwed up again. But you haven't. There's just too many choices and you're allowing too many factors to be at play here. Jocko, however he said it, is dead on.
And there's another way that's talked about in the military, which is an 80% solution now is oftentimes better than a 100% solution tomorrow. And it's all about like speed over certainty. In the military, it applies a lot of times. But that's the way I think people should generally, not always, but generally look at their lives if they haven't quite built anything yet.
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