If you were looking for someone to piss off, I wouldn’t recommend you choose Jocko Willink.
With an impressive career in the SEAL teams, a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, 300+ podcast episodes, and his ever-expanding clump of businesses, it’s been interesting to watch Willink gradually build his Tactical Operations Centre in the digital space.
To add to his wide-ranging list of feats, Willink co-authored Extreme Ownership together with fellow SEAL Leif Babin, producing a fascinating book which is part war story, part life advice, and part business consulting. Unsurprisingly, book’s the breadth and density of this knowledge made for some interesting moments throughout its chapters, one of which I’d like to expand on today.
Clean Your Room (and Everyone Else’s)
As you might expect, one of the key themes of Extreme Ownership has to do with taking responsibility. A leader, the authors argue, should take responsibility for everything that goes on in the team, regardless of the initial temptation to cast blame on others.
Recalling his second deployment to Iraq, Willink recalls a tragic instance of fratricide (friendly fire) that resulted in the death of a friendly Iraqi soldier. In a story that that he later recounted in a TED talk, Willink details how—by taking full ownership of the this mistake—he gained the respect of his subordinates and superiors whilst still extracting valuable lessons from the experience. This is the core of Extreme Ownership as a principle; without accountability, there can be no growth.
Interestingly, this notion of the importance of responsibility can also be seen in the work of clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson. Perhaps most famously, Peterson urges those around him to “clean [their] rooms” in an attempt to figuratively and literally restore order to their daily existence. By organising the immediate, controllable environment in which they exist, Peterson argues, an individual can better organise their lives. When combined with the idea of Extreme Ownership, this creates an interesting progression of thoughts:
Take responsibility for your immediate environment to better organise yourself as a person. Then, take responsibility for your wider environment to become a better-developed individual and to help those around you.
If this were to be the case, then responsibility is not merely a burden to be carried, but a valuable opportunity. As is often the case, this synthesis of two similar ideas gave me a third one:
The Responsibility Redistribution Hypothesis
In the modern world, there is often ample opportunity to be sheltered from the consequences of your actions:
People outsource their mating choices to dating apps.
People outsource their opinions to hyper-curated news feeds.
People outsource their aspirations to the accepted norms of society.
People tweet angrily about environmental destruction and social inequality using phones made from unsustainably mined cobalt whilst wearing shoes made in windowless sweatshops by poverty-stricken six-year-olds.
Everywhere you look, people (including you and I) are continually failing to take adequate responsibility for the gravity of their decisions and actions.
In many common examples, this can be incredibly frustrating to deal with: nobody likes a lazy co-worker, an irresponsible friend, or a family member who’s quick to cast blame. What I realised as I began connecting Peterson’s and Willink’s ideas, however, is that this laziness may be more useful to you than you realise.
As people become increasingly lazy, they flippantly hand over control of their lives to those willing to accept the responsibility. As this trend continues, the difference between those who do and do not adopt responsibility will inevitably widen. Moreover, if such a transfer of responsibility were to eventually collapse under the weight of its own inequality, the laziest among us are in the worst positions to protect themselves and those they care about. This is the core of my Responsibility Redistribution hypothesis:
As people continue to hand off responsibility to others, the few that don’t will make themselves increasingly integral to the functioning of society (and to the that of their own lives). In all likelihood, this trend will only become more accentuated with time.
This polarisation might occur all at once during a sudden, catastrophic event, but my guess is that it will continue at its current rate for as long as our systems can sustain. In terms of long-term projection, I only really see two possibilities:
1. A very small number of people become incredibly powerful, giving them a dangerously-high level of control over the population.
2. The redistribution of responsibility becomes so polarised that it collapses, whereupon everyone is left to fend for themselves and those they care about.
This may sound pessimistic, but there’s a deceptively simple solution: both above negative outcomes can be solved by simply taking as much responsibility as you can.
Of course, there must be realistic boundaries to this; it would probably be impractical to live an entirely self-contained life whilst taking full accountability for everything. In this sense, the difference between those who do and do not adopt responsibility is not just the degree of ownership they have over themselves, but their capacity to adapt and solve the problems of daily life.
Fortify Yourself
Many smart people throughout history have illustrated the importance of taking responsibility, and others are now doing so over the internet. It’s easy to feel like your daily work goes entirely unnoticed, but—whilst that may be the case—remember that it may make the difference between freedom and redundancy.
Never stop thinking.
- Will