Essentials: How to Become Resilient, Forge Your Identity & Lead Others | Jocko Willink

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. Thanks for having me, man. 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, but also things that you do and ways that you approach things that might not contradict, but not be so obvious to people, might be a little bit counterintuitive. There are generators and projectors. And generators are people that are just from a very young age, they realize they can impact other people. They want to create things in the world. And then there are these projectors that like to just kind of reflect on what they see. And it's not that generators are good and projectors are bad, the world needs both, that they really work in a kind of symbiotic way. But your story captures the essence of what it is to be a generator, which is that by doing certain things, you can have an impact and it feeds back to you, and it's likely that they receive something from it as well. Yeah. And where this all came to fruition as I as I now piece together as you're talking through this stuff, look, when I joined the military, you joined the military and you get a blank slate. No one cares what you got on the SATs or the and no one cares about anything. You're a blank slate. And then with that blank slate, it is, 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 in compensation for 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 you don't control 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. And so 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, Oh, 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 that I know I …