The Savage Mindset That Makes Hard Things Easy - Jocko Willink (4K)

I know that you're a fan of the Thomas Sowell quote, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." What's that mean to you?

That you're never gonna completely solve anything in your life or in the world, and there's always gonna 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 gonna run into some real (laughs) problems. But if you look at it, and the fact that, ya- you know you might put a little more effort over here that's gonna take away from s- 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 over-achiever mindset is, well, everything needs to be growing at all times. So, there's a- an emotional pain of watching something stagnate or watching something fall behind. How do you try and navigate that?

Y- you just have to figure out what the priority is. A- a- a- and- 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 gonna have to weigh those things out, and re- recognize that you can't do them all a- simultaneously at the same time all the time. It's just, it's not gonna work. So you gotta figure out where you're gonna make some compromises, where you'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 especially if you like novelty, like doing lots of different things, "Oh, this is interesting to me, I'm- I'm curious, I want to..." You go, yeah, okay, dude, but there is a limit, right? And when you start to sp- 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.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of those laws of combat that I- y- teach and used to teach in SEAL teams and now I teach to businesses, prioritize and execute. Like, you've gotta figure out what the priorities are and then execute on those things. But you gotta figure out what the- what the biggest priority is at any given time, like I said, whether it's this business or your family or your health, at certain times you gotta say, "All right, I gotta pay attention to my family right now. I can feel things are gettin' a little bit-"