Breaking Down Extreme Ownership on The Art of Vibrant Living Show: Video automatically transcribed by Sonix

Breaking Down Extreme Ownership on The Art of Vibrant Living Show: this mp4 video file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Daniel Aaron:
All right. All right. We will. Soon, soon, soon. Be broadcasting. To. All right. Hey, y'all. Welcome to the Art of Vibrant Living Show. It's a solo broadcast today. Daniel Aaron here. I am your host, and I am excited to share with you about something that's really kind of radical. Well, what's not radical here is that this is a about a book. And what we know is that leaders are readers. And personally, I am obsessed with reading. I have been since I was a little boy. I love reading. I love learning. And it's such an incredible gift to be able to tap into the minds, hearts, experiences, wisdom of other people. In this case, the book is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, two Navy SEALs commanders. I'm not sure that's the right word. Pacifist Not really a military guy. Me So pardon me if I distort a little bit some of the nomenclature. First, though, The Art of Vibrant Living show. What is the art of vibrant living? Well, it is how to live in such a way that you are fully alive, thriving. Right? My mission is to help millions of people live their lives in an extraordinary way, full of love, joy and incredible vitality. And to do that. What's it take? Well, it takes all cylinders firing in the human system. That means physical vitality. Right? Amazing physical energy and vitality. Emotional, thriving. The stories we tell, the outlook we have on the world. It also has to do with our relationship with time, our relationship with other people, our community, our significant other, our family. Right. It also has to do with our livelihood, our work, our mission, what we do in the world, our financial situation, our financial freedom, right. As well as our spiritual life. And while physical is the bottom of that, because without as how does the saying go? A healthy being a healthy man, I'll just say it the way it's usually said. A healthy man has a million dreams. An unhealthy one has but one dream. Right? So physical vitality and energy is the base of it all at the top of that pyramid of vibrant living, though, is spirituality, gratitude, connection to source, connection to something bigger than us.

Daniel Aaron:
And it's just a little ways below that is leadership. And for me personally, I was not ever interested in leadership until I discovered that I was in a position of leadership inadvertently 20 something years ago, after I started leading these personal and spiritual development trainings in Bali. And then I got obsessed with leading, learning about leading, learning how to do it well. So this particular book, the title again, Extreme Leadership, it came across my radar just when it was released in 2017. And, you know, I've I read another book about Navy SEALs in a way. What was that book? Um, oh, gosh, it's almost coming back to me. It was really the same guys who wrote the Rise of Superman, and the next book they wrote was Stealing Fire. Right. And it talks in that book about how Navy SEALs work together and create tap into something beyond the ordinary, something esoteric, even spiritual, to work together. So I've been aware for a while of the extraordinary training and leadership of the Navy SEALs. When this book came out in 2017, Extreme Leadership, I thought, Oh yeah, I want to read that. And, you know, it's just one of those ones that never came to me until recently. And funnily enough, it was a marketing coach of mine said, you know, he wasn't speaking to me specifically. He's like, You all got to read this book and I'm so happy that I dove into it. And I've really been quite obsessed with it since I got into it. And as I'll share with you in a little bit, I have really mixed feelings about it, though, because, oh, by the way, let me pull up the comments over here. So what I will do is I will share a little bit about the book, the three key takeaways, what in my opinion, what are the most important parts of this, the things that you can use in your life right now to up the quality not only of your leadership, but the quality of your life? And in my early study on leadership, I came across this quotation which I put into my book, The Art of Spiritual Leadership, because it was so profound. The quotation was, is.

Daniel Aaron:
The level of your your leadership determines the quality of your life. No, I distorted it. That's not quite it. How did it I'm going to have to paraphrase it because I remember the exact quotation, but it was something like this that your skill in leadership determines your happiness and success in life. Your skill in leadership determines your happiness and success in life. In other words, as far as you go with your leadership, that's as far as you can go with your happiness and success. And I remember when I read that I was like, What? No way. That's that's too that's going too far. You know, I thought, okay, yeah, leadership that's important in organizations. And, you know, when you're doing things as a collective. But whoa powerful though. Very true. I learned that it is extremely true. And I'll share more about that later, because right now, let's let's dive into it deeper. Pull up my notes over here as well. Um, and, and the book is, is great. I mean, just to give you a quick overview on what this book is, these two Navy SEALs both again, don't know the right terms exactly, but high level Navy SEALs, they were not just Navy SEALs, but they were high up in the leadership. I don't know. Sure. What you call them, commanders or patrol leaders, something like that. Forgive me. Um, and they were in Iraq. Um, what was the time period of that anyway? You can get to that. They were in Iraq when there was the whole thing with Osama bin Laden and the reclaiming of Ramadi, one of the main urban war centers in Iraq. And from their perspective, it was an incredibly successful thing where they basically reclaimed this war torn city and trained and gave it over to the Iraqi. And here we go. Okay. It's hard to stay away from this peacekeeping force. Don't know. Peacekeeping force. Can you call people with guns? A peacekeeping force? I don't know. We'll get into that. In any case, these guys had some amazing, incredible experiences over there that were really notable and not just from the perspective of danger, which of course adds drama to any story, but from the perspective of high level leadership learning.

Daniel Aaron:
So the way they structured their book is they tell stories of their experiences and not just any stories, stories that illustrate some key principles to leadership. And then they take that principle and they apply it to business and sometimes to other places as well. And much of what they have written squares with me. And the subtitle for my book is 40 Laws to Transform Your Life and the World. There are. As, uh, what's his name? John Maxwell put it, irrefutable laws of leadership. His book was There are 21 irrefutable laws of leadership. In any case, let's. I think that's enough of an overview. Um, I will say last thing before going deeper though, is I love the book. It's a fantastic book. I'm getting a tremendous amount out of it despite my misgivings or along with my misgivings perhaps is more accurate way of putting it. Okay. So first key takeaway number one, most important key takeaway, and this is not just for leadership, y'all, This applies to anyone in life who wants to have a quality life, a good life. And guess what? It's the title of their book, Extreme Ownership. If we translate it, it also means there is no such thing as victim consciousness. If we want to be a leader, if we want to have an extraordinary life, it is absolutely necessary to take extreme ownership to admit the truth that we are all responsible for our own lives. Now, the this part of the book early on in the book for Leif and Jocko, starts out with a story about one of the missions they were on there in Ramadi, the city in Iraq. And what happened was there was a few little errors, a bunch of little errors that added up to a situation where two US and Iraqi friendly Iraqi forces ended up facing off with each other, what they call fratricide or blue on blue, which, as you can imagine, especially in the middle of a war, is about the worst thing that could possibly happen. Right. It's bad enough to be fighting an enemy, right? An enemy. Another one of those terms we'll come back to. But bad enough to be in the danger of fighting somebody that wants to kill you, let alone get to the possibility of shooting at and hurting the people that are on your side.

Daniel Aaron:
And that's exactly what happened in this case. Luckily, the damage wasn't too bad. They escaped some of the damage, however, And part of what happened with it, though, is for and I'm not sure if it was Jocko or Leif who was leading this, it was an immediate curtailing of their authority by their commanders. Right. So immediately the command came down to them, don't do anything else. The implication was clear You screwed up big frickin time, right? To get to that point, what the hell happened? Right. And they sent higher up leaders and investigators in to say what on earth happened here? This is bad news. And so, of course, what happened, I'm thinking it was Jocko who was leading this at the time. What he did at that point is start to inquire how did this happen? And he talked to, you know, this subordinate leader and this subordinate leader and this person in the field and this sideways commander and all these different people and kind of pieced together, okay, there was this mistake over here. This wasn't communicated over here. They thought this was going on, but they hadn't communicated over here. And so what he found is there were a slew of mistakes. And so what happened was when they started the I'm going to call it a tribunal, it wasn't a tribunal. The investigation, the hearing, I don't know what it was exactly called in the seal terms. But when they started the investigation with the authorities that came in for this, the question was what happened? How did this happen and whose fault was it? And to their credit, a bunch of the junior leaders said it was my fault. You know, I didn't take care of this thing I was supposed to do. I didn't report on this. I didn't communicate this over to here. And in each case, what Jocko, the author and the man who is in charge of it, what he did was say thank you for speaking up. And no, it wasn't your fault. And finally, after about three of those. The lead investigator said, well, what's going on? Who is at fault? And he said, Me, I was at fault because I was in charge of the mission.

Daniel Aaron:
Right. And this is extreme Ownership is such a powerful concept and a difficult one. Right? Because it means for us, when we are in a position of leadership, when we're leading, whether it's, you know, a military organization, a platoon, whatever, or a business or a community or as a teacher leading a class. Right? Part of my life is as a yoga teacher, We are responsible for all that goes on. Let that sink in for a minute. That's challenging, right? That's challenging because, you know, we can't control everything. Things happen that are out of our control. And when we take that level of responsibility, right, if so-and-so didn't do what they were supposed to do, well, it was my job to teach them in such a way that they were able to do what they were supposed to do. If so-and-so didn't report to the other team, what they needed to report didn't communicate well. It was my job to teach them well enough that they knew the importance of that communication and they could make it happen now. Of course, there are what we might call acts of God, force majeure, things that happen in the world that are beyond anyone's control. The key point here, though, is and the takeaway is not just in leadership, but to have a great life, we have to take extreme ownership. We have to take responsibility for everything, which means never once blaming it on someone else. The truth is that whatever failures we've had and I put both hands up because I've had many it was never anyone else's responsibility. It was never anyone else's fault. And what we tend to do is say, Well, I didn't have such and such resource. I didn't have the communication and then have the team. My team wasn't trained enough, I didn't have enough money, I wasn't smart enough, I didn't have the degree. Whatever it was, it's not the resource. It's our resourcefulness. Right? Big pill to swallow. Super powerful when we do. Because what comes along with extreme ownership, what comes along with taking full responsibility? Well. Oh, hold on. We got a we got a. Um. All right.

Daniel Aaron:
We're going live on LinkedIn now to I guess that had broken down. That was my responsibility. Um, so and if you just joined us on LinkedIn and you want to back up and get the first, where are we now for 17 minutes of this broadcast? You can do it over on YouTube or on Facebook to get the recording for that. So onward though, that's the first big principle and last piece of it. What comes along with extreme ownership, taking total responsibility for everything? Well, nobody to blame also means there's one person that we can count on that can take responsibility, that can take ownership, that can change situations. And that's us, right? It's an extreme amount of power that comes with that. And responsibility number two, take away. I love this one. The way they put it is you got to have standards, right? And I'm actually not going to say a lot about the way Jocko speaks about this, because it reminded me so much of the brilliant, amazing quotation by Archilochus Greek writer and poet who said long time ago, We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. Okay, let me say it again. We don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. Right. Which is part of why when you know, when when you get some insight into the Navy SEALs, part of what's so amazing and why they have this incredible mythos about them is their training is so severe, so brutal. Right. And they tell some of the stories of the training in the book, extreme ownership and how many, you know, amazingly fit, strong, strong mentally, as well as physically guys and maybe women. I don't know actually about that. If, you know, let me know. Are there women seals? That's something I've not ever even asked about. In any case, some very strong, wise, driven people who have many of the times trained for years just to get to the point of their basic training. The vast majority of them don't make it through the training because it's so severe, so strong. And that is a huge part of why they are so successful in what they are doing right now.

Daniel Aaron:
What's also very cool about this, and I'm going to just reveal now a little bit the disturbing part for me about this book right now. Personally, I love learning and I know that when we have a learning cap on, when we are a student of life, when we are devoted to growth and awakening million opportunities for learning all the time everywhere we go, this book is no exception. In fact, it's a great example. There's so much that I have learned in the midst of this book and. What I said before. I'm a pacifist. Part of what I mean is I have taken an oath to I won't say do no harm because that's impossible in the Sanskrit term is ahimsa and it means best. Translation I've come across now in 30 years is do the least amount of harm you possibly can do the least amount of harm you can, because let's face it, we are going to do things unconsciously without meaning to. That will hurt other people. I, you know, I might walk through a glass door later today and not realize somebody was behind me and let it go and it bonked somebody in the head. I didn't mean to, but I know I'm going to do some harm, right? I speak for a living and I say things sometimes that come across not in the way I intended. And it feels hurtful to somebody, right? I've done some harm. I didn't mean to. So my oath, my passion, my swearing is that I will do as little harm as possible. And of course, there are some things that are beyond my control. One of them that's not, though, is physical violence. Right? So I have taken an oath. Part of my oath is that I will not be physically, physically violent. I became a vegetarian at 35 years ago, in part because I came to this realization that. Doesn't make sense for me to love somebody and kill them at the same time. Those just don't square for me, right? And no, I'm not laying anything on anybody else about what your dietary choices are or the way you operate in life. This is what the realization was for me.

Daniel Aaron:
So coming to this book, Extreme ownership, like, okay, you know, there's something of course, dramatic and exciting about hearing these war stories, right? And there's such there's so much in here that's amazing examples of bravery and heroism. Right. And certainly I can learn to be more brave all the time in in and apply that in my own life, not in a physical, violent situation, but life. An extraordinary life takes a lot of bravery. So I'm cruising through this book. Maybe it was chapter 3 or 4. I get to one of the stories which starts out with a bunch of seals, and I think it was some Marines also had just arrived in this city, Ramadi. Again, this is like the epicenter of the urban battle scape over there. And, you know, hairy, scary place it was. These guys had just arrived. And right after they arrived, like immediately their base got attacked. And so a whole bunch of them were not even prepared anything, whatnot. Didn't have all their military clothing on their, you know, flak jackets, all that stuff. They just ran up to the rooftop and pulled out their various levels of machine guns. And, you know, they're starting to shoot everywhere, not everywhere. They're shooting at the enemy. Right. And let's rewind for a minute, though. The enemy. What does that mean? Well, of course, somebody who's infinite, whose interests appear to be in conflict with ours, someone who wants to do us harm. Okay. If we wind it back, though, to deeper spiritual truths, whether we look at it from the yoga perspective or any. Metaphysical perspective. There is no other, let alone enemy. And one of the great realizations of spiritual awakening is that perceived other is just us in another form. And what liberation is, what awakening is, what yoga is, is the realization of oneness. And when we come to those greater realizations. Of course, there's no desire to harm other because other is us. And of course, as we awaken to that oneness, part of what we realize is compassion, right? There is this instinctual desire to help, to do good, to support, in part because we know we're doing that for ourselves.

Daniel Aaron:
That is ourselves. Any pain is our pain. So. But, you know, context. I'm looking at this situation and, you know, these guys are, of course, worthy of great respect and appreciation. They're putting their lives on the line for what they believe to be important and true and. Right. Right. Whether that's accurate or not is separate from the question of do they deserve respect and appreciation? Of course they do. Right? We live in a very primitive culture society level of evolution, right? How could it possibly be all that? Here we are 20, 23, and we are still solving things, dealing with things, approaching things through physical violence and war. I mean. Really? That's astounding, isn't it? If you think about that. Had the experience last year. My daughter, who was 14 at the time, and I were traveling through Puerto Rico and we went to a it's not a national park. I forget what they call it in a territory, but a place that used to be a fort and it was from 5 or 600 years ago. It's amazing. Cool piece of architecture, really. And it was this fort with these walls that were this thick and it was right on this promontory, outlooking the ocean. And part of why Puerto Rico had so much. How do you call it? Her military activity and it was occupied by so many different countries over the years is because it was a very strategic land spot, you know, island spot out there with its proximity to North America and to Europe and the Caribbean. So my daughter and I are having this tour of this old fort, which, you know, cool. It was really interesting and fascinating. We were reading the placards are going through it and it was like could feel in some way the energetics of what it was like 500, 600 years ago and seeing these old cannons and these cannonballs and picturing what it was like to be in this fort and duck down here and looking out through these little slits so you could shoot at the ships out there and the ships are out there firing cannonballs back here. And at one point, I turned to my daughter and I was like, Zayda, can you believe that?

Daniel Aaron:
You know, like this is what we used to do. And she looked at me like I'm the biggest idiot on the planet. Not for the first time, mind you. And she wasn't wrong in that moment because this was March last year, and it was just shortly after the Russia-Ukraine war had broken out and it was still getting a lot of press at that point. And I had to. Stop for a minute and got teary eyed like. We're still doing it right. So. Lots of respect for these guys who were doing their job right in service of our freedom. Right? That's the archetype, that's the energetic, that's the paradigm that they are living in. That's the paradigm that exists in most of the world and most of the US. So no criticism of them, plenty of criticism of that paradigm. That's another story, though. But part of what they shared in the book is in that moment, these guys all scampered up onto the roof. You know, some wearing flip flops, t shirts, had their machine guns out and they're shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting. And then one of the comments came from somebody there. It was a quotation. It said how excited he was because he'd done a whole tour of Iraq before and he never got to shoot his machine gun. And they literally said how fun it was to shoot the machine guns, you know, to shoot. And I just thought, wow, I understand. Sorta. But that's really disturbing to me that there's a part of us that still finds joy in. Shooting a gun that kills people. Right. Especially a sophisticated one like that. Really disturbing. But hey, I'm not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I appreciate it. And I am going to pause, though, because I've been on a little bit of a monological rant. We got second half of this takeaway still to go and the third one coming up. So I will check over here. And Kelly asks the name of the book and if you're still there. Kelly The book is called Extreme Leadership, right? No Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin.

Daniel Aaron:
Beautiful, amazing book. Love it. So going back, though, to the second principle standards, we talked about Archelochus great statement that says we don't rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. Well, that to me also points to why spiritual training, yoga, meditation or what I prefer to think of as creative, dynamic, inward, inward process is so important, right? Because unless we train ourselves to be present, unless we train ourselves to be less and less reactive, to have longer refractory periods, we will still fall to the level of our training, which is animalistic as part of us, as human animal, part of us as human spirit. The human animal part will strike back, is always ready for a fight, is always defensive. It's survival oriented. We are evolving beyond that. We're evolving more and more into human spirit that knows oneness. Yet we still carry with us that human animal part. Which again is why spiritual practice, spiritual training is so vital for spiritual leaders. Right. All kinds of leaders. And you know what they're talking about in extreme ownership isn't spiritual leadership necessarily. It's leadership. And there's a lot to be learned from that. Let me reiterate for the 42nd time. I respect and appreciate these guys, what they've done and the quality of the book. Let's go on, though, to the third Great takeaway. There's a lot more I'm just giving you the the three that struck me most powerfully and I love this one. In seal parlance, they call this prioritize and execute, prioritize and execute. And this for my fellow entrepreneurs, for people that lead families, for anyone in human life is so important because there's so much coming at us all the time. There's so much for us to take care of. And the greater the complexity of our lives, the more there is to take care of and the easier it is to feel overwhelmed. Right? So prioritize and execute. Gets even better when it goes to what the training is for the SEALs on this. And it comes down to three expressions Relax, look around, make a call. Right. Because what often happens when we think, I'm going to take care of this And what about that?

Daniel Aaron:
And there's that bill to pay over there. And I got to call the school and this client needs my response. And, oh, the bank is calling over here and, oh, the faucet is leaking. I got to take care of that. We start to have the things add up and what do we do? What happens to our energy? Right? We start to get tense, right? How am I going to take care of all these things? So what happens to our our effectiveness at that point? It goes way down. So this is such a beautiful key point. And they give an amazing story in the book and I won't try and do it justice here, but the story of a mission they were on in Ramadi that went kind of sideways, where despite their great planning, some things happened that they weren't expecting Somebody through fell through the equivalent of a trap door. They got locked out of a building. They there was a bomb that was set to go off. So literally, like the bomb is ticking, it could kill them. Now somebody is on the floor incapacitated. They're stuck in this building. How are they going to get out? All of this is going on. Much more extreme than what goes on for us as a business owner, yet the same principle. And if we try to do and boy, oh boy, have I done this in my life to great detriment, if we try and do too many things at once and by too many I mean more than one, right? Then we reduce our effectiveness, we get stressed out. We do a poor job of it. So what's the answer? Relax. Look around, make a call. Right. And in business, entrepreneurship, that means. I gotta make a decision. And what goes with this is the beautiful wisdom of James Allen Wright, his amazing spiritual book called As a Man Thinketh. One of the key points he brings across there is successful people, and great leaders are quick to make decisions and slow to change their mind. You know, and part of what comes with that and then I'll wrap this up, part of what comes with that is a trust in life, right?

Daniel Aaron:
That's the human spirit part of us, right? The human animal part that's in defense mode, that's in survival mode is always saying, you know, what could go wrong? What could go wrong? How am I going to mess this up? The human spirit's part says, Well, we got eternity. So since we got eternity, we're just going to keep growing and learning. So from that perspective, make a decision, right? Just choose if it goes great, wonderful. If it doesn't go great. Wow. I learned a lot, right? There's a wonderful quotation. I think it was Schwarzkopf, right, General? From years ago. Who talked about this principle and said it this way. What does it take to have a great life? Good decisions. How do we have good decisions? Bad decisions, right? So we want a great life. We make good decisions. How do we make good decisions? We have bad experiences that teach us how to choose differently next time. So third takeaway relax, look around, make a call. So reviewing amazing book, Extreme ownership. Right? Key principles for leadership that apply in life and business by two Navy SEALs. Very entertaining, dramatic and well written. Many great principles and stories in this book. The three key takeaways I leave you with are like the title says, Extreme ownership means we are responsible for everything in our lives and in our organizations. We are responsible. Number two, you got to have standards, right? Leading isn't about preaching. It's not about what you say. It's about what you tolerate. Right? So if you tolerate poor performance, if you as a yoga teacher, if you tolerate students doing things that are not helpful for their practice or destructive to the class, well then you have set that standard. So as a teacher, as a leader, it's about creating standards and upholding those standards, not about what we say, it's about what we allow or tolerate. Third key takeaway prioritize and execute. Right? We just spoke about this. Relax, look around, make a call. And that means be decisive. Choose tackle one thing at a time. All right, y'all.

Daniel Aaron:
I hope it has been interesting. I hope it's been useful at the very least, innocuous. And if you got comments, if you got questions, whether you're watching live or by broadcast rebroadcast, please post it in there. Let me know and I will be happy to respond. What else would you like to hear? I'm doing more live broadcasts and I would love to serve you best. We got book reports. We got interviews. We got teachings about yoga, life, leadership, spirituality, financial independence, financial freedom, passive income. What is most interesting to you? Because this is the art of vibrant living show. And the art of vibrant living requires that all cylinders are firing, that we are moving into mastery in all the aspects of what it means to be human. All right, y'all, thanks so much for tuning in. I'm your host, Daniel Aaron. Aloha.

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