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
Whether they're at rock bottom or just starting out like they're young people or whatever age you're at. If you feel like you need to make a change, like you said, the pain of staying the same is greater than making a change. If you're at that point, you kind of know it. Think about what matters to you, whatever it is.
I like to equate it to when you're in the shower by yourself and you're just having unfiltered true thoughts. Ask yourself, what do you really care about? Honest to God. Forget what society says you should care about. Let's say you really just wanna be famous. And that's the actual core. And you don't even know why, but that's what you want. Well, guess what? Listen to that part of you.
It's not vain. It's a thing that matters to you. Similarly, if you're like, I wanna be just rich. Great. If that's a real motivation for you, like at your core, in the shower, it's just you. If that's really what drives you, great. Those are boxes that must be checked for something to be worth doing. So it's like have your shower thoughts and be real with yourself.
Like what do you really actually care about? Not what society says, not what you want your family, none of that stuff. For me, honestly, the reason the SEAL thing really paid, I wanted to do it ultimately, is I wanted people to say, that's John Allen, the Navy SEAL. Because to me, it was like I had been the black sheep in my family because of me. I had discovered this.
But it's like, oh, his sisters have done this. Oh, his dad's done this. His mom's done this. And then there's John. I wanted something that sort of overrode the mediocrity and failure. And I felt like, what better thing? What more honorable thing? And also, I wanted to serve. That's another check. It's a big goal. That's difficult. That's a check.
But ultimately, it was like, I want people to know that I became a Navy SEAL. That mattered to me. And you know what? It flies in the face of what Navy SEAL instructors tell you, which is you shouldn't do this because you want to be a Navy SEAL. You should do it because you want to serve the country. And, like, that's true. And what else are you going to tell your students?
But if you really want to be real about it, you've got to find your real motivation, and that box must be checked.
Yes, it is.
Ultimately, exactly what you said. If that box goes unchecked, you might in your life eventually convince yourself that you never needed to check that box. But at some point, at some point in your life, when it becomes too late or you're about to die or you're on your deathbed, you will have regret.
And I can actually speak to a specific instance in my life, which I had checked a box by this point, but I had one that I hadn't checked. I was in Afghanistan in 2014. And we were in this alleyway and a grenade came over the wall and it detonated next to a whole bunch of us. And I nearly bled to death.
And I have this moment where I can't pull the tourniquets off of my kit that are rubber banded to my chest for quick access to stop the bleeding. But I was so weak and like losing my vision. We're in the middle of this gunfight, I couldn't get them off.
And I realized as I'm sitting in this alleyway in the middle of this like horrible place in Afghanistan, like the town was very kinetic and dangerous. And I'm waiting to either be shot by the enemy, who we know is on the other side of the wall that could be coming around, or I'm going to bleed to death, or there are RPGs being fired blindly in our direction. It's like I'm about to die, 100%.
I'm actively bleeding out, or I'm going to be shot. And all that was running through my head, there was a couple thoughts. There was one that was kind of funny now, which was I was like, hmm, I wonder if my obituary will say Jonathan Allen killed in action, John Allen killed in action. So that was going through my head.
But I also, in addition to that, I had this really acute sadness that I hadn't started a family yet. I didn't have kids. I was married. We've been married for several years. And my wife and I, we'd sort of talked about having kids before that deployment. But we were like, oh, we'll have time. And I'm sitting there in this alley bleeding to death or expecting to be shot to death.
I'm at the end of my life. And it was like, holy shit. I wish I had a child. Yes, that's horrible for the kid. They lost their dad. But like that was a box for me. I wanted a family. What was the first thing I did when I survived this and got home? We started a family. So it's like that's sort of an extreme example.
But I do really believe that a lot of people have boxes that are going to go unchecked. But to your point also – Just try to do it and fail. And believe it or not, you actually checked the box.
It was not immediately after, but basically between that and some mental issues I was having, I was pushed to see a psychologist. This is like years after. So 2014, that injury happens. I survive, obviously. And I ended up getting surgery to sort of like my shoulder was banged up and I got fixed up enough to deploy again. But I was just not fit to serve.
Physically, I was really struggling to keep up. I had some issues with my shoulders and my knees. I have shrapnel in my leg. But ultimately, I was recommended to a psych in the military because they're like, dude, you are not like a sane person. Things are not going well for you. Like close friends of mine just sort of said, I don't think this is working out. And I was very angry.
I had like – now I can say it. It's like I had very stereotypical or whatever you want to call it, PTSD. Like I had not dealt with the near-death experience in Afghanistan and sort of how that went. And so I ended up going for a medical retirement, which was driven in part by the physical injuries but also by like mentally I wasn't there.
So I get medically retired at the end of 2017, and I never really had a plan. It's like I knew I was going to get medically retired, which just means you're going to get out, and there's going to be this amount of money you get paid. It's a retirement. It's not really enough to live on realistically. You're going to have to have a job.
Showing 101–120 of 344 · page 6 of 18
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