Andrew Huberman interviews former Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink on discipline, resilience, leadership, and the power of detachment
Andrew Huberman speaks with Jocko Willink, retired Navy SEAL officer and leadership consultant, in this Huberman Lab Essentials episode.
Summary
Andrew Huberman speaks with Jocko Willink about discipline, resilience, identity, and leadership — drawing on Jocko's military career and his work as a leadership consultant through his company Echelon Front. Jocko argues that motivation is an unreliable emotion and that discipline — not inspiration — is what drives consistent action. He presents detachment as the single most powerful leadership and life skill, describing how stepping back physically and mentally from a situation dramatically expands one's field of view and decision-making capacity. He also addresses how leaders must act as a counterweight to group morale — moderating both arrogance after wins and despair after losses — and explains how action, rather than reflection, is his primary remedy for adversity.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Andrew Huberman: Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Jocko Willink.
Jocko Willink, welcome.
Jocko Willink: Thanks for having me, man.
Discipline, Identity, and the Military Blank Slate
Andrew Huberman: In my view, and I think in the view of a lot of people, you embody discipline. So today I definitely want to talk about routines but also mindsets — and also things that you do and ways that you approach things that might not contradict, but might not be so obvious to people, might be a little bit counterintuitive.
There are generators and projectors. Generators are people that from a very young age realize they can impact other people — they want to create things in the world. And then there are projectors who like to reflect on what they see. It's not that generators are good and projectors are bad. The world needs both and they work in a symbiotic way. But your story captures the essence of what it is to be a generator — that by doing certain things, you can have an impact, and it feeds back to you, and it's likely that others receive something from it as well.
Jocko Willink: Yeah. And where this all came to fruition, as I now piece together as you're talking through this — when I joined the military, you get a blank slate. No one cares what you got on the SATs, no one cares about anything. You're a blank slate. And then with that blank slate, it's: hey, if you do this thing, if you perform this task and you perform it well, you will get recognition. You will hopefully get more control over your own destiny — which is the ultimate compensation for human beings. To have more control over your own destiny. You can have all the money in the world, but if you don't control what you're doing every day, or at least most of what you're doing, then it's not worth it. The reason people try and make money is so they can have more autonomy in their life.
In the military, it became very clear to me very quickly that if I performed well, I actually got a lot more freedom with what I did. That's when I started to realize: what I'm doing right now is going to impact not only what's going to happen to me in the next hour, but in the next two years, three years, five years. The more I focused on doing things that are going to positively impact my future, the better my life became. And I think that's a very huge lesson to learn — one that I know I didn't figure out for quite some time.
Energy, Exercise, and Morning Routines
Andrew Huberman: I get the impression — and I think everyone gets the impression — that you're somebody with a lot of energy. I wonder whether you wake up with a lot of energy and feel like you have to burn it off with physical activity and work and other demands, or whether you find that you wake up with energy that's kind of neutral and exercise gives you energy.
Jocko Willink: I would say it's both. There's no way I could say, "Oh yeah, every day that alarm clock goes off and I'm like, oh yeah, let's rock and roll." That's certainly not the case. It's also certainly not the case that every day I'm like, "Oh god, not again." I'd say most of the time the alarm clock goes off and I don't think a bunch. When my alarm clock goes off, I don't debate with myself. I'm not negotiating. The thing goes off and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. It's sort of robotic.
Now, this much I can say: when you go and work out, you're going to feel better. You will get energy from working out. If you go break a sweat, you're going to feel better and you're going to get more energy from it. You've got to go really, really hard to where you feel more tired when you're done — and even that, you've got to go psycho. I'll do that occasionally, but not on a daily basis. If I wake up, lift, run, surf, and then do jiu-jitsu in the afternoon, at the end of that day I'm tired. But a normal day of working out just makes you feel better and definitely gives me energy.
Andrew Huberman: The idea that movement and exercise gives us energy is an important one — and frankly, I was hoping your answer would be that, as opposed to you waking up every day wanting to attack the world because you have so much energy getting out of bed. I never feel that way, but I always feel better after I train. Do you nourish after you train, or do you find that eating slows you down?
Jocko Willink: I find that eating slows me down. I don't eat a big meal until I'm kind of done with the physical stuff for the day, which is usually at night — six or seven o'clock — which I guess has some downsides. I eat too late.
When I'm working with clients — I have a leadership consulting company, Echelon Front — when I'm going to work with a client, I'm not eating, because they're going to be asking me questions, we're going to be diving into what's happening inside their business. There's a lot of cognitive work going on. Podcast — I'm not eating before a podcast. I don't want to have a bunch of food in my stomach. You get a certain level of mental clarity when you haven't eaten. Going out on missions, I never would eat before going out. I would eat when I came home. Get home at four in the morning, three in the morning from an operation — cool, then I'll eat, because then I'm going to do a debrief for fifteen minutes, clean weapons, eat a big meal, go to sleep. I don't want food in my stomach when I've got to perform or execute anything.
Exercise Types and Their Effect on Mental State
Andrew Huberman: So much of what you embody and what you do centers around this idea of discipline, of course, but also energy. Are there certain forms of exercise — like weightlifting versus cardio — that you find give you an especially big boost in what we're calling energy? This could be cognitive energy, physical energy, a readiness for the next thing.
Jocko Willink: I would have to say the high-intensity, sort of anaerobic blast — whether it's on the bike, on the rower, swinging a kettlebell hard, something like that. That last ten or fifteen minutes is a really good way to peak my mentality for the day.
Winning, Losing, and Leadership on the Battlefield
When you were in the teams, what was your observation about how winning and losing would impact people in the short and long term — from the perspective of leadership, and maybe more importantly from the perspective of yourself? How do you work with that? How do you calibrate wins and losses? How do you transmute losses into energy? Because wins we know convert to energy, but losses can sap our energy way down.
Jocko Willink: To start with, I think the selection process to get into the SEAL teams weeds out a lot of people who can't recover quickly from something bad. The kid who was the star of the football team, the star of the basketball team, the captain of this, the captain of that — he's been winning his whole life. He goes to BUD/S and he quits. Because in BUD/S, you're not going to win. They're going to find what you're not good at and they're going to exploit that, and you're going to lose. A lot of guys who lose and find it disrupts their motivation are probably just going to quit. That's why you get this massive attrition rate with guys who are studs — Division I athletes, Division I wrestlers, Division I football players, Division I runners and swimmers. They all come to BUD/S. They all quit. Not all of them, but there are plenty of examples of the highest-level collegiate athletes in sports that translate very well to basic SEAL training, and they quit. Sometimes it's because they don't know how to lose. They don't know how to recover from a loss.
So once you get to a SEAL team, you've generally got people who are going to be pretty resilient when it comes to dealing with a loss. But once you're in the teams, you start taking much more significant losses. You're not losing a race — you're losing one of your friends. And this is what, from a leadership perspective, you have to pay attention to.
When you're a leader in any organization, you're basically in charge of a mob when it comes to morale. They feed off of each other just like a mob in the streets going, "Oh, we can break this window — let's break all the windows." That mob mentality happens with morale inside a team. And you as a leader can't get caught up with the mob. You have to detach yourself from the mob mentally so that you don't get caught up in their emotions and their morale — because if you do, you can't correct it.
We go out on a mission. The mission goes great. We get into a gunfight, kill a couple of bad guys, everyone's okay, high fives, everyone's feeling great. You come back to base. "Hey, we don't need to debrief — that was perfect. Hey, we don't need to maintain our gear, we can just go to bed. We're awesome." That's when the leader has to say, "Oh, we've got the mob, and the mob is becoming slightly arrogant." Hey guys, real quick — that was a good op, but there are some things we could improve on. You've got to bring that mob back to center line.
Same thing in the other direction. You go out on an operation, it doesn't go well. You take casualties. You come back to base and you see guys moping around, the spirit starting to break. And if you're part of that mob, your morale will be breaking too. You've got to look and say, "Oh, I see what's happening." Hey guys, listen up. That was tough. Didn't go the way we wanted it to go. We need to learn some lessons. Here are some things I can do better. What can we do better to make sure that never happens again?
So as a leader, when it comes to winning and losing, you're generally going to be the person countering the mob mentality. When the mob starts winning, they might get arrogant. When the mob is losing, they might start to lose more because their attitude goes down the drain. That's what you have to pay attention to from a leadership perspective.
For me personally, when I lost guys, I focused on: we need to celebrate the life, mourn the loss, and then we need to go to work. We need to get our gear back on, lock and load our weapons, and get back out there. The best way to contend with problems, with adversity, is action. The more you sit and wait, the more time you spend with that adversity having the upper hand inside your head, the worse it's going to get.
Taking action — it doesn't have to be huge, it doesn't have to be some mammoth triumph you're going to pursue. But if you say, "Hey, this is what happened, didn't go the way we wanted it to. We're going to get our gear back on, go back out, do this other mission" — and it's the same in your personal life. You didn't get the job you wanted, you didn't get the promotion — you can go home and sit there and dwell on it, and that's not getting you any progress. Or you say, "Okay, let me do a quick analysis. Why didn't I get that promotion? Oh, it's because I didn't get this qualification or I hadn't jumped through this gate. Okay, cool. How do I get through that gate so next time I will get the promotion?" And you start taking action. Action is a cure for a lot of problems that we have in life.
Parenting and Modulating Emotions
Andrew Huberman: I think in the context of moderating these systems, it's so key — key to having a long arc in a career path, military, science, or otherwise. As a father in particular, how do you apply these same sorts of ideas when your kid is kind of down because it's hard to be a fourteen-year-old, or when they're up?
Jocko Willink: Clearly it's a very similar thing to what I just talked about. If your kid wins the wrestling tournament and is like, "Yeah, I won!" — what do they want to do? They want to eat a triple-cheese pizza. They want to go crazy. And you as a leader, as a parent, as a friend, need to say, "Hey, man, you did good. That was awesome. You had a great day.
"But let's start thinking a little bit about next week too. How about we just have a few slices of pizza as a reward?" And this goes for yourself as well. You do something, you have a success, and you say, "That's great — but all glory is fleeting, and I need to get back to work."
Do people go too far with that sometimes? Yes, absolutely. Sometimes people don't stop and celebrate at all, and those are the kind of people I think eventually get burned out, because they never say, "Hey, that was awesome. We had a big win. High five." So as a leader, as a friend, as a parent, as a spouse, you want to help modulate that. Don't shut it down. Your kid walks off the wrestling mat and you say, "You could have won by more" — no, I'm not talking about that. Or your kid walks off the mat after losing and you say, "You got what you deserved" — no. You've got to be the counterweight to the emotions that other people have.
When you're doing a good job as a leader, as a friend, as a spouse, you're doing a good job as a counterweight. You want to provide some balance for people to make sure they don't get out of control. You notice when people have a downfall, it's normally because they've surrounded themselves with people who provide no counter, no counterbalance. If you were my best friend and I went out drinking last night and had a great time and you said, "Heck yeah, let's do it again tonight" — eventually, where are we going to be? We're going to be in the gutter somewhere. But if you say, "Hey, dude, that was awesome, but hey, remember we've got school on Monday?" — you pull me back. We've got to find balance in life ourselves, and then as much as we can, provide balance for other people, because people are emotional and they get caught up in what they're doing.
Identity, Hardcore Music, and the Formation of Self
Andrew Huberman: You seem to have a very strong sense of context and self. Was there something in your upbringing, your parents, or was it just kind of how you always imagined yourself — like, yeah, this is who I am? Because I think many people do not have a very firm sense of self, or their sense of self is so rigid that they can only operate in a narrow trench of one domain of life and end up very isolated.
Jocko Willink: As far as where I became me — I actually have to give a lot of credit to the music I grew up listening to and the attitude we had back then listening to hardcore music. Being able to stand up against what other people were saying — which is what you're doing when you're in that scene. And the whole DIY nature of it: hey, we can just do this ourselves, we can just make this happen for ourselves, we don't need anybody else. That hardcore attitude — sticking by your friends, standing up, getting in fights — that's kind of my attitude. That music is the soundtrack to my life. I always had that music running in my head.
But to your question — I had something in me that when I heard that music for the first time, I was like, "Okay, here it is." I hear the Beatles, I hear the Grateful Dead, I hear the Rolling Stones, and you go, okay, that's fine. But when I heard hardcore music for the first time — when I heard the Cro-Mags, when I heard Agnostic Front, when I heard the Bad Brains — it was just like it was part of me already. I'm a kid living in the woods in Connecticut, just kind of hearing what I'm hearing. Listen to the lyrics of Minor Threat. Listen to the lyrics, and you go, "Okay, I agree with this stuff."
I think that kind of set a datum in my head of being okay with being outside, being okay with saying no, being okay with being a rebel, being okay with not going along with what everyone else is doing. That became very important when I was in the military and I looked at what leadership might be telling me to do and thought to myself, "Hey, that doesn't seem like a good idea" — and having the wherewithal to say, "Hey boss, I'm not sure this is a good idea." Not to be a jerk about it, but just to say, "There might be a better way to get this done. What do you think of this?" or "Hey boss, can I ask you a question about that?"
If I had to trace it back — having Black Flag's My War side two on my record player for like a year and a half straight, that's going to leave a mark. And I think it left a mark on me.
Motivation vs. Discipline
Andrew Huberman: What are your sources of motivation?
Jocko Willink: You've probably heard me say that motivation isn't something I'm going to count on, because it's just an emotion that's going to come and go. Just like feeling happy — you feel happy right now, maybe you won't feel happy in fifteen minutes. You feel sad now, maybe you won't feel sad in fifteen minutes. You feel motivated right now, you might not feel motivated in fifteen minutes. Therefore, I can't rely on it. I'm not going to put any money on just being motivated because it doesn't really matter to me. The daily actions I take aren't from motivation — they're from discipline. As I said earlier, I'm not going to get up and go through some big debate about whether I really feel like doing this. It doesn't matter, so I'm just going to go do it.
Andrew Huberman: You've said several times today that rather than looking for sources of things outside you — like a job or a relationship, which are all great but as sources of energy or motivation or inspiration — you use positive action as a source of energy.
Jocko Willink: Yeah. And positive action is what you have to contend with when there's something you're afraid of — step into it, move towards it. You don't solve problems by running away from them. You solve them by moving towards them and figuring out what's going on.
Then we could go down the whole path of talking about the indirect approach, which is a theory of combat that I completely believe in, but it also applies to interacting with other people. If I have a problem with someone, I might think, "I've got a problem with Andrew, I'm going to go confront him on it." And that might not be the best solution. In fact, it's probably not the best solution to go confront you with the problem, because now we're going to have a confrontation. It might be better to take an indirect approach — not confront you, but instead engage in a conversation about something adjacent to the problem. And then eventually that builds our relationship to a point where you start to recognize, "Oh, I bet Jocko feels something about this thing," and we can move towards a solution instead of me trying to punch you in the face with some truth I believe versus the truth you believe. Now we're engaged in combat and there are going to be casualties. I'd rather take an indirect approach and build a relationship where we can solve problems in a more positive way.
Detachment as a Superpower
Andrew Huberman: I also heard you say something earlier that's still flagging in my mind — not thinking too much, and the third-personing of the self. I'd love to talk a little more about this, and in particular the topic of meditation. Do you meditate? And if you don't do a kind of standard meditation, are there times throughout your day and your routine where what I'm describing maps to something that feels like open monitoring or focused meditation?
Jocko Willink: No, I don't meditate. I don't think I've ever actually meditated for one second in my life and I've never tried to do it. That being said, if the goal is to take a step back and detach from what's going on, I do that all day every day. That's something I've talked about and tried to teach — I tried to teach young SEAL leaders not to get caught up in what's happening right in front of them, but to take a step back, detach from the situation, detach from their emotions on the battlefield. I want people to be able to see more angles, more maneuvers, more opportunities, more of what the enemy might do, more perspective.
It goes back to what I was saying about the mob. Being able to be part of a team, part of the mob, part of the gang, but still have the ability to take a step back, detach from that, and assess what is the best way for this team to move forward — to me, that is the true superpower of life.
This goes back to when you talk about people going through struggles. If I'm looking at you and you're in a bad state — you're depressed, you're sad, you're moping around, you're not getting anything done — I see a storm cloud around your head. All you see, no matter what direction you look, is storm. All you see is darkness. I'm outside looking in and I'm thinking, "Hey, this guy's got a great education. He's healthy. He's got a good team around him. He's got all these things going for him." But you in that state literally cannot see anything but the darkness of the storm. And that's what's so scary about when people enter that mode — I can look at it from the outside and say, "Andrew, you just got to move like four feet forward and you're going to be through this thing," and yet you might hear me say that and go, "No, Jocko, I'm looking ahead and there's nothing but darkness."
Helping people move forward, take action, and get that perspective — detach and get outside themselves, get outside their own heads. Tim Ferriss said, "Get out of your head, get into your body." That's one way to do it. Take action, go do things.
It's very scary, and I'm sure you've had this experience where you're talking to someone you know and you're looking at them going, "Hey, man, it's going to be okay" — you can clearly see that whatever is bothering them and dragging them down, a lot of times it's a relationship. The girl or the guy, they got dumped, and you go, "Hey, man, that person was a disaster anyway. You're better off without them." And they cannot compute that. They are stuck there. Or maybe it's the school they didn't get into or the job they didn't get, and they get so wrapped up in it they can't get out of that storm.
It's such a helpless feeling. And that's why trying to engage with people and give them that superpower of detachment — where they can take a step back and say, "You know what? You're right, man. That girl wasn't who I really thought she was. I should move on." The solution to your problem is not going to be found in the problem. You have to get out of the problem so that you can look at it, make an assessment, and figure out how to solve it — or whether you even need to solve it. Detachment is a superpower.
Andrew Huberman: What is your process for engaging detachment, or for disengaging?
Jocko Willink: I recognized in a moment what detachment was and how helpful it was — on an oil rig doing a training mission. My whole platoon is in a skirmish line looking at a large area of the oil rig that we're supposed to be clearing. This is not combat. This is the nineties. There's nothing going on. We're just doing training. And I'm standing in this skirmish line — the youngest and most junior guy in my platoon — standing there looking down the sight of my weapon, waiting for someone to make a call and tell us what to do.
I wait five seconds. I wait ten seconds. I wait twenty seconds. No one's saying anything. We're waiting for a leader to make a call. And finally, after about thirty seconds — which seems like an eternity — I can't take it anymore. I take a step off the skirmish line. I look to my left. I look to my right. And what I see is every other guy in my platoon staring down their weapon, which means their field of view is tiny — maybe a twenty-degree field of view. You're looking down the scope or the sight of your weapon, and that's how big your field of view is.
I'm looking and thinking, "There's my platoon commander — looking down the sight of his weapon. There's my platoon chief — looking down the sight of his weapon. There's my leading petty officer — looking down the sight of his weapon. There's my assistant platoon commander — looking down the sight of his weapon." Everyone in the platoon is looking down the sight of their weapon, which means they all have a very narrow field of vision.
When I take a step back and look left and right, I've got a massive field of vision. I can see the whole scene and I can see exactly what we need to do. Now, as a new guy, you need to keep your mouth shut. You don't say anything. And I'm thinking, well, but no one else is saying anything. So I muster up all the courage I can and I open my mouth and say, "Hold left, clear right" — which is a basic tactical call. This is not patent-level genius. It's just a normal call to make in the situation we were in.
I'm expecting to get slapped — told, "Shut up, new guy." But instead, everyone just repeats the call. Hold left, clear right. Hold left, clear right. We get to the top of the oil rig — the helo deck — which means we cleared the whole thing. We go into a debrief, and now I'm expecting to get told, "Hey, what were you doing? Keep your mouth shut." Instead, the platoon chief goes, "Hey, Jocko, good call on the cellar deck down there."
And I thought to myself: hold on a second. If I'm the youngest, most junior guy in this platoon, why was I able to see what we needed to do and make that call? And then I realized — it was because I took a step back. I broadened my field of view, which allowed me to think more clearly. Instead of being hyperfocused and narrowly focused, I broadened my range of vision. I took a breath before I made my call — I had to take a nice breath to speak clearly — and I realized that taking a step back and detaching, I got to see infinitely more than even the most experienced guys in my platoon.
And I started doing it all the time. In land warfare, in urban combat, in all these tactical training scenarios. It always allowed me to see what we needed to do. Then I started doing it in conversations with people. I'm having a conversation with my platoon chief and I can see he's starting to turn a little red in the face — we're about to argue about something. I said, "Oh, wait a second. He's getting mad right now. And he's the platoon chief." So I say, "Hey, you know what, Chief? That sounds good. Let me go re-look at the plan." And I started doing this in my normal life — not getting wrapped up in my own emotions, not getting wrapped up in the gunfight happening right in front of my face, not getting wrapped up in the details of what was going on, but instead taking a step back, detaching, looking around, and then making a much better decision.
Now, if you are the only person in a gunfight, it's going to be harder to do that because you've got to be focused on whatever you're shooting at. But when you have sixteen or twenty guys all looking in the same direction, it's very easy to be the guy who goes, "I want to take a step back, look around, make a call."
When I teach this to people now — the mechanics of it — take a step back. Literally, if you and I are at a meeting and things start to get heated, I will literally push my chair back away from the table. Change my perspective. Widen my field of view.
The other thing — in the SEAL teams, you don't want to sound panicked on the radio for a couple of reasons. Number one, when you panic on the radio, it causes other people to panic. Number two, if you sound panicked, everyone's going to make fun of you. So what would I do before I keyed up my radio? Take a breath. I'm manually slowing down my breath. I'm broadening my field of view.
So if you're in a meeting, or you're at the supermarket parking lot and someone starts to yell at you — take a step back, take a breath, broaden your field of view, detach from those emotions, and make some space.
Here's another little nuance: lift your chin up and put your hands down. When I get defensive, what am I going to do? I'm going to raise my hands up and put my chin down. That's a fighting mode. So if you and I are having a discussion and I'm starting to get heated, instead of putting my chin down and putting my hands up where I can put them in your face — no. I'm going to take a step back, put my chin up. It changes my perspective a little bit more, changes my visual perspective just by changing the angle of my head. Take a step back. Put my hands down. I'm not in a defensive mood. I actually want to hear what you have to say.
And if I start listening and not talking, it's very hard to be detached when you're talking. That's another key component. You want to detach — shut your mouth. In meetings in my companies, I'm not the one doing all the talking. In fact, I'm doing mostly listening. That way I'm detached. I'm listening to what they have to say. I'm more capable of seeing what holes there are in their plans by not moving my mouth.
So those are some of the methodologies I use and advise people to use in order to effectively start down the pathway of being able to detach in various scenarios. It applies to everything we do. If you're having a conversation with your significant other and you start to see that they're getting frustrated about something — if you're in the conversation one hundred percent, you're going to get frustrated too. You're going to get frustrated that they're frustrated. Next thing you know, you've got an emotional argument going on.
Whereas if you take a mental step back and say, "Wait — why are they frustrated right now?" Oh, because I'm trying to solve their problem when really what they're looking to do is vent. Okay, got it. Let them vent. "Oh, that sounds horrible. What do you think you're going to do?" Instead of saying, "Well, if that's the problem, here's what you should do."
This ability is something that can absolutely be trained — and that's what's cool about it. It's not a natural gift. Some people will be better at it than others, but it's something you can train. I used to see guys develop it in the SEAL teams, and I see people develop it now in the business world.
Building Resilience Through Deliberate Discomfort
Andrew Huberman: Do you think there's value to doing things each day that suck a little bit, or from time to time doing something that puts one into a state of deliberate discomfort?
Jocko Willink: One hundred percent. In order to improve yourself, you've got to impose some discipline on yourself. Just like you would develop your legs by doing squats and develop your back by doing pull-ups, I think you develop your resiliency by doing repetitions of things that require you to be tougher.
Andrew Huberman: I just want to extend an enormous thank you. As a civilian, thank you for the work you did in the military, but also for teaching people about the military. I think a lot of people don't realize what it's about at any level, and learning about your experience there and what you've observed — bringing other people's experiences from the military more broadly — is super important. And thank you for sharing this and being able to entertain some of my scientific riffs.
Jocko Willink: There are plenty of people who have done way more than I've ever done and sacrificed infinitely more than I ever sacrificed. So I'm thankful for being here. And the same back at you — I have greatly benefited from the information that you put out, so I thank you as well. I appreciate coming on here and appreciate you spreading the word about how people can be better. Thanks for having me. Let's do it again.