Jocko Willink is a retired United States Navy officer in SEAL Team 3, an author and a podcaster. In a world overflowing with choices, we often confuse freedom with indulgence. But real freedom—the kind that builds confidence, resilience, and leadership—comes from discipline. From forging inner strength alone to leading elite teams of Navy SEALs, Jocko's life proves that discipline is the foundation for true autonomy. Expect to learn how people can be more confident with their decision making, the best tactics to overcome fear, what it’s actually like to be in a firefight, what people misunderstand about what ‘Discipline equals freedom’ actually means, what a disciplined like looks like to Jocko, how to train mental toughness, Jocko’s thoughts on the new administration and military recruitment numbers, if we’re close to a major conflict, how men can be better about handling their emotions, and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What does the quote 'there are no solutions, only trade-offs' mean?
I know that you're a fan of the Thomas Sowell quote, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. What's that mean to you?
that you're never going to completely solve anything in your life or in the world. And there's always going to be compromises that you have to make. And if you aren't willing to make those compromises or you don't keep your mind open for those compromises, you're going to run into some real problems.
But if you look at it and the fact that, you know, you might put a little more effort over here and it's going to take away from some effort over there, you can't just do everything at once. So yeah, no solutions, only trade-offs.
How do you deal with the tension of feeling that other thing pull away from you, right? You know that you need to focus and you know that by focusing on one thing, another thing is going to start to drop away. But the classic overachiever mindset is, well, everything needs to be growing at all times. So there's an emotional pain of watching something stagnate or watching something fall behind.
How do you try and navigate that?
You just have to figure out what the priority is. And at certain times, you know, certain things might be a higher priority right now than it is at some other point and something else picks up. And sometimes the family needs to be the priority.
Sometimes the business, sometimes the other business, sometimes the health, like you're just going to have to weigh those things out and recognize that, you you can't do them all simultaneously at the same time all the time. It's just, it's not going to work. So you got to figure out where you make some compromises. We're gonna make some trade-offs. Yeah.
The, uh, the sentence, you can be anything you want, but you can't be everything you want is so good for that. And, uh, Especially if you like novelty, like doing lots of different things. Oh, this is interesting to me. I'm curious. I want to... Yeah, okay, dude, but there is a limit, right? And when you start to... It's the most obvious thing in the world.
If you spread yourself too thinly across lots of different things, you can't be that great at all of them. You can't be really that great at any of them after you start to spin it up after a while.
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Chapter 2: How do you balance priorities in life?
Absolutely. I think it lowers the bar of self-expectation, not to a negative point where it's like, oh, I've got low expectations of myself. But if I was to be coming up here to sit down with you and have this talk, and I was thinking, what if he asked me about something I don't know about? What am I going to do? And I'd be a little bit panicked.
And then you'd ask me about car racing, Formula One racing, right? Which we were talking about before we started this. And now all of a sudden you said, well, hey, in Formula One, the drivers do this. What do you think of that protocol? And I was like trying to formulate in my head, pretend like I know what I'm talking about. When I don't.
So instead I just say, oh yeah, I don't know anything about car racing. So you tell me. And that means the whole drive up here to come and sit down with you and get interviewed by you. Instead of me being paranoid that you might ask something I don't know about and my confidence is now shaken.
Instead I'm rolling in here like, oh yeah, if he asked me some stuff I don't know about, I can say, oh yeah, I'm not really 100% sure about that. What do you know? Or what's your opinion?
It's liberating. I think it's very liberating.
Is that sort of humility? Yes, I think that is humility. And it is something that you get when you're in the military. You know, you can be in charge of people that have more experience than you. And if that makes you uncomfortable, oftentimes people flex to try and act like they know more than they do when it's like, oh, yeah, you've run these kind of operations before, Chris.
Why don't you take lead on this? Okay. I'm the senior guy. I'm the boss. But I say, hey, Chris, you've already run these type of operations. Why don't you take lead on this? No big deal. Does your respect for me go down or does it go up? Goes up. Exactly. As opposed to me saying, here's what we're going to do, Chris. And I don't know what I'm talking about.
And you can clearly see this because you've done it 25 times. And I'm an idiot. So yeah, I would say be more humble and you'll be more confident. Yeah.
It's really interesting to think where you're lowering the stakes. In that definition of confidence, there's no such thing as not having enough confidence. There is just being yourself. And then if you are yourself and you meet the limits of whatever your competence is, your understanding... hand it off to someone else or say, Hey, does no one, Oh, brilliant. No one here knows what to do.
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Chapter 3: What are the keys to building confidence?
You know, if fucking the Wright brothers were around only a couple of years later when World War I had started, it's like, maybe they would have gone a bit... I mean, they went pretty quick. But... Yeah.
And you're seeing now exactly why that's the case, because people are coming up with all manner of garage solutions made with sellotape and cable ties to fix really, really... What was it they were talking about? A Javelin is a million dollar missile meant to shoot down a $500 drone.
That's it. It's not a good way to win wars.
No, but these EMP things that Joe was telling me about, I can't remember, it's a gadolinium or this special type of element that's inside of this super high frequency capacitor that deploys a really targeted pulse and it can shoot these things. Like this is fucking insane. So yeah, you know, it's not been that long.
since you were yeah on the and to your point like i would i will watch a world war ii movie or a vietnam movie and i'm like oh yeah i see what's happening like i i've done something like that right there you know and and now you go well i didn't have that happening i didn't have a freaking drone flying over me trying to drop a grenade on me or it's just the advances are so rapid
Or a guy, I would imagine now, that in some of the special forces, at some point in the not-too-distant future, there'll be a fucking head of robot operations or something. There'll be a guy who's got a fucking suit and a laptop and a drone and he can deploy all shit out of a Batman belt.
And honestly, I mean, when I think about this... I always wished that instead of creating Space Force, they created a cyber force, like a totally separate cyber warfare, because...
basically we're talking about the conflict of ideas right that's what's happening in war is essentially the physical manifestation of a conflict of ideas and so what does that mean that means information and now we have your information versus my information so what does that boil down to in this day and age it boils down to cyber warfare and information operations you know uh
How can I make the people on your team believe the ideas that I have instead of your ideas? That's... Media propaganda. Media propaganda, cyber, internet. That's what it is. And so I wish that we would have started an arm of that instead of Space Force. But people get really scared because when I say, hey, Chris, what I want to do is I want to develop...
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