Jocko Wilnick's three principles for success

In this video, (transcript here and embedded video at the bottom of the page) Jocko Wilnick describes his three principles for success.

Actually, there are four. Jocko starts with the first one: similar to what I wrote in my post The hard way is the easy way.

He says it the other way: The easy road is longer and more painful than the hard road.

There are no shortcuts, there are no hacks. If you want to take the easy road, I promise you it’s longer and more painful than the hard road. I know. I’ve lived it. I’ve ventured down the easy road at times in my life. And it never led to anywhere good.

He articulates three principles. I’ve talked about two of them, but have not written about them. So I’ll fix that.

Jocko’s principles

1. Stay humble
2. Take ownership of everything
3. Discipline = freedom

Stay humble

Jocko says:

in life, you’re going to have to do things that you don’t want to do. Maybe things that you don’t think you should have to do things that offend your precious ego. When I got done with a basic SEAL training and reported on board SEAL Team one, you know what I was assigned to do? I was assigned to clean toilets. That’s right. Despite having just graduated some of the most difficult military training in the world. Despite being assigned to an elite Commando Unit. My first mission at the actual SEAL team was to clean toilets. Not exactly a glorious job. But you know what? I did it, I did it to the best of my ability and took pride in doing it well. And that attitude got noticed. If I cared that much about how clean the toilets work, people knew I would do a good job with even more important assignments. After a short period of time, I got those more important assignments. But it was humility that opened the door for me. Now, being humble does not mean you shouldn’t be confident. You certainly have to believe that you are a capable person. But don’t let confidence turn into arrogance. So keep your ego in check and stay humble.

My take:

Past Me got me here, and I’ve learned to be grateful.

But gratitude does not prevent me from seeing him as he was. He was an arrogant prick who thought himself better than almost everyone.

He was called gifted, but he wasn’t grateful for the gifts he’d been given.

Doing menial jobs was beneath him.

Rules were for other people.

He was special.

Well, maybe he was special, in some ways. But he behaved as though he deserved his special status. He didn’t. What made him special was not of his doing. He hadn’t earned a high IQ. He hadn’t earned good health. He didn’t deserve to be born into the circumstances in which he found himself. He didn’t earn the values and habits that his parents managed to train into him.

All he’d done was to manage to not to fuck himself up, too much.

Extreme ownership

Jocko says:

… take ownership of everything. I call this Extreme Ownership in the military, the best leaders and the best troops were the ones that took ownership of everything in their world, not just the things they were responsible for. But for every challenge and obstacle that impacted their mission. When something went wrong, they cast no blame. They made no excuses. They took ownership of the problem and fixed it. You can implement this attitude as well. Not only in your job, but in your life. Let other people blame their parents, their boss, or the system. Let week or people complain that the world isn’t fair. You are the leader of your life. Take ownership of everything in it.

My take:

I’ve come to this view: I’m responsible for everything around me.

Suppose you do something that pisses me off. Who’s responsible? I am, of course. I don’t have to be pissed off for what you did. I might choose to dramatize my upset, but only if I judge that it’s the best way to improve the situation. Certainly, I wouldn’t want to do that just to punish you for pissing me off. You’re responsible for what you did, but I’m responsible for my action.

Suppose I do something that pisses you off. Who’s responsible? Me, again. It’s not to say that you’re not responsible for your reaction. But I’m responsible for precipitating your reaction?

How does that work?

If you’re pissed off after something that I did, there are two possibilities.

• One is that I deliberately set out to piss you off. In that case, I’m undoubtedly responsible.
• But supposing it was not my intention. I did or said something that was not intended to upset you, but you reacted. How could I have done such a thing? The answer is: I was ignorant of the way you would react. Are you responsible for my ignorance, or am I? Or are we both? From my view, the answer is simple: I’m responsible for my ignorance. (And so are you for your own.) But I’m responsible for the consequences of my ignorant acts. My ignorance is not a defense.

Responsibility is not a zero-sum game. I can be responsible whether or not you are.

Responsibility is different from causation—or fault or blame. The answer to “Who is responsible?” is not the same as the answer to “Who caused this effect?” It’s the answer to “Who is going to make things right?”

Jocko’s concept of Extreme Ownership matches my concept of responsibility.

Discipline = freedom

Jocko says:

Principle number one, discipline equals freedom. That’s not a contradiction. It’s an equation. Discipline might appear to be the opposite of freedom. But in fact, discipline is the path to freedom. Discipline is the driver of Daily Execution. Discipline defeats the infinite excuses that hold you back. Some people think motivation is what will compel them to get things done. But motivation is just an emotion, of feeling. And like all feelings, it’s fickle. It comes and goes. You can’t count on motivation to be there when you need to get through truly challenging times. But you can count on discipline. Discipline is something you dictate. Motivation won’t make you exercise every day. Discipline will. Motivation won’t stay up late and finish a project for you discipline will, motivation isn’t going to get you out of bed in the morning. Discipline will make discipline part of your daily life, and your daily life will get better.

My take

I’m just coming to understand the importance of discipline and I’ve been working hard on building my own. Up early in the morning. Voluntary discomfort with cold showers. 189 days and counting of daily meditation. And I am now trying to build a better, more disciplined blogging practice.

In conclusion

Jocko says:

So be disciplined in all that you do. Don’t subject yourself to the whims of motivation. Stay humble and be willing to do what needs to be done and take Extreme Ownership of your life and everything in it. Then choose the hard path, the path of responsibility, hard work, and sacrifice the path of discipline, humility, and ownership that ultimately leads to freedom. If you follow these principles, then nothing in the world will stop you.

My take:

Good advice.

Here’s the video, and a link to the transcript.

Transcript

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Observing myself by watching

Yogi Berra said it. “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

And you can learn a lot about yourself just by observing.

I’ve been watching and observing and learning some things about myself recently. Some have been pleasing. Some have been embarrassing. But overall, I’m pleased even to discover the ones I’ve found embarrassing. Knowledge is the goal.

That’s a useful thing to know about myself, and one that’s pleasing to know.

This mash-up embedded below of Jordan Peterson’s talks (full transcript) has inspired me.

There’s a lot of stuff here, but let me give you a taste.

You don’t know yourself

You know, one of the things I often told my students and my clinical clients as well, I guess I probably told my family members this, as well, some of the many ways that one of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don’t.

Point 1: You don’t know yourself. And if you think you do, you’re fooling yourself. Just as the self is a kind of illusion, so is the notion that you know yourself.

…you have to understand that you don’t know who you are. And that’s not easy to understand. Because you think you know, but then you know, you remember, you can’t control yourself very well; you’re not very disciplined, you’re full of flaws. Maybe you don’t know yourself as well as you think. But it’s hard to get low enough to understand how deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are.

Point 2: It’s hard to “get low enough to understand how deeply is the case that you are ignorant about who you are.

The idea that I know myself is a kind of illusion easily pierced by watching myself and seeing how many things I see myself do that are inconsistent with my self-image.

I did that?

I woke up last night and wandered around eating things when I wasn’t hungry?

That’s not me?

Who is that person, anyway?

You can learn to kind of watch yourself like you’re watching a stranger. But you have to adopt a position is a position of radical humility.

If you’re serious about learning anything, humility is an essential prerequisite. If you’re serious about learning who you are, you have to start by acknowledging your ignorance.

Meditation teaches me that. Ideas arise in my mind. Where do they come from? I don’t know. I do things. How do I decide? I don’t know.

I can come up with explanations, but are they the right ones? I don’t know.

The more I acknowledge my ignorance, the more I feel open to new knowledge. If I’m not ignorant, what could I possibly learn?

I know a lot, but my ignorance—about anything—is much greater than my knowledge.

So I want to learn to focus on what I don’t know. If I don’t, then what I do know—some of which is false—will get in the way of learning new things.

And I do want to learn. At least I believe I do.

I’m better at learning new things than most. But I fall far short of my ideal.

If I compared myself to other people, I might feel pride—and that would not help me.

So I choose to compare myself to my ideal and look for ways to approach my ideal — one small step at a time.

You don’t know how incompetent you are

Peterson recommends that you acknowledge how incompetent you are at making the changes that you want to make. That’s a mistake I’ve repeatedly made. I see the changes I want to make. I decide to change. And I think I can just do it.

But I can’t.

…there’s things you could do to improve and you know what they are.

And so, I think does everyone, if they observed themselves carefully.

And there’s small steps that you could take that you might take that would put you in that direction? And then the question is, are you big enough to take those small steps

That’s been my repeated error. I don’t want to take small steps. I want to take big ones. And I’ve tried. Because I haven’t been big enough to take small steps.

Why small steps?

…are you capable of grappling with the fact that you’re fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost childlike steps in order to manage them? And the answer to that is, yeah, you are.

That’s what I’ve been discovering this week. I’ve been working on my software project and improving my blogging practice.

I’m finally facing the fact that I have to break things down and take “almost childlike steps” to make progress.

But you have to be humble and wise enough to understand that you might have to aim pretty damn low…

It’s because you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to admit that, and there’s going to be a loss of ego, destruction of ego, arrogant ego that necessarily accompanies that. But you need the loss of that arrogant ego because it’s precisely what’s interfering with your movement forward.

That’s what I’ve learned from observing myself this week.

It’s easy to focus my attention on the things that I do well and congratulate myself for them.

It’s easy. But it’s a mistake.

It distracts me from clearly observing the things that I do poorly. And unless I see what I do poorly, how can I expect do what it takes to change?

Some good things I learned

I saw myself doing some things well.

I focused on the things that I did poorly and decided that I was not going to be satisfied with the level of performance that I’ve accepted for years.

“Better than other people” has been good enough for me in the past.

“Not the best I can do” is the new standard.

This week I’ve looked at small inefficiencies as problems deserving respect and attention. And one by one I’ve solved them.

I wasn’t a perfectionist, but I tried to hold myself to a higher standard than I’ve done in the past.

I have some grand aspirations, and I hope to make progress.

I realize that the way to get there is by taking those “almost childlike steps.”

This is one.

​

Awesome development, Redux

Awesome Development is a blog that I started in 2012, posted to sporadically—a total of 23 posts —and now I’m determined to resurrect.

Why?

Building software tools has been my passion for years. The tools that anyone with an internet connection can get for free are astounding. And they are getting better every year.

I want to document what I learn—as I learn what I need to learn—to build the tools of my dreams.

Because I have learned that writing about a thing forces me to understand it better.

And because leaving behind a trail of bread crumbs may help the next guy—especially if the next guy is Future Me.

If you are interested in such stuff you might want to Subscribe to Awesome Development by Email

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Blogging, the current state of my practice

In this post, I am going to recap the current state of my blogging practice, and some improvements that I hope to make.

This is a long, technical post, mainly for the benefit of Future Me, and the benefit of Present Me as I solved these problems.

What I do now

Here’s the way things work right now.

Open my tabs

I start by opening the tabs that I’m going to use for writing a particular post. I blogged about that in this post.

Go through my checklist

My blog template contains a preflight checklist. It’s all the stuff that I ought to have completed before I start composing the blog’s content. In theory, I can march through the process without going around in circles, as I described in another post, written, but not published.

One pass through, and I am done.

The checklist is in Markdown format so that I can use this convention:

“`markdown

• [ ] this is unchecked
• [x] this is checked

`“

Which will render this way:

• [ ] this is unchecked
• [x] this is checked

Enough intention

The first item on the checklist is to make sure I have enough intention to finish the post. The test at each step is: do I predict that I will finish.

Clear picture

I need to make sure that I have a clear picture of the intended result. If it’s a long post (like this one) that means that I need to outline.

So do I have enough intention to outline?

Do I predict I will complete it?

Research as needed

As I’m writing the outline, I do the research I need and drop links and quotes in the Google Doc.

I’ve got a research inventory stashed in Dynalist, and Onetab, and Pinboard and Evernote.

During the research and composition phases, I can use a Chrome extension called TabCopy. It creates formatted links in the clipboard. I can choose to do it for the current tab, selected tabs, or all the tabs in the current window.

Then I paste them into the Google Doc.

If I want to clip some texts, with a reference back to the original URL, I can use the Dynalist Chrome extension, which will give me a linked quote like this:

Maybe there’s a connection. Perhaps not. But right now I’m going with maybe there is.
From 70 Years Old. WTF!: Search results for predictive processing

There are parts of this process I can automate later.

Compose in Docs

Now it’s time to compose the content in a Google Docs, using voice typing. Like I’m doing right now. Or was then.

As I complete each section, I’d like to review it and make sure I’m on track quickly. I haven’t yet developed the habit of doing that.

The check-in process will come later.

Clean up in StackEdit

Once my draft is complete, I copy/paste the entire Google Docs content into StackEdit.

StackEdit turns links in Google Docs into Markdown, using the format:
`“

text to appear

`“
Now everything is in plain text, and I can edit it in Grammarly.

I had been using the Chrome extension Copy as MarkDown to give me tab links in Markdown format, but StackEdit will convert the content that TabCopy puts on the clipboard.

Clean up YouTube links

YouTube links look like this when captured with TabCopy

“ [An interesting video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESNRgaCkiUA&t=756s)“
They won’t render on the page. To do that I need to use the magic number at the v= parameter in an embed embed URL in an iframe, like this:

<figure class="video_container">

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/enMumwvLAug" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"

width=100% height=300 > </iframe>

</figure>

### Check in Grammarly

Once I’ve got a clean post in StackEdit, I copy/paste the source into [Grammarly](https://grammarly.com) for spelling and grammar checking.

### Another check in StackEdit

In case I screw up some of the Markdown while editing in Grammarly, I can copy back into StackEdit for a quick visual check.

### Into blogger

Next, I copy/paste the content into the Blogger new post tab.

Once it’s there I do this:

1.  Set the title (and remove from the document)

2.  Set the tags (and remove from the document)

3.  Render as markdown using [Markdown Here](https://markdown-here.com/)

4.  (Optional) Schedule the post

And finally...

5.  Click Publish


## Some other bits

### Screenshots

To capture part of a screen, I used to have to crank up a Chrome Extension ([Nimbus Screenshot](https://nimbusweb.me/) for example).  After I’ve selected the area that I want, I download it. Then upload it to a shared folder

On my Google Pixel, I can use my Pixel Pen to capture the area that I want. I highlight the area and automatically downloads it to my Downloads folder.

Now I can upload it to my Blog Images Google Photos Album. [A link to it is here](https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipOV8cTgthOV571-2hmuRzG74MFX9HJT2-Ad489D).

There’s probably an API for that. Later.

### Blog photos

To get the URL for a Google photo, I go to the Blog Posts folder, and click on the image I want and open it in the browser. The URL in the omnibar is NOT the one to use. Instead, right-click the image and choose “Copy image URL.”

If you put a photo in a Google Doc using Insert -> Image -> By URL and then use that URL. When you copy/paste the Doc contents into StackEdit, StackEdit will convert it to Markdown format:

```markdown

![](image URL)

with the text blank.

You can also paste an image URL into StackEdit using ctrl-shift-g. If you select some text, then that text will be used as the image alt-text:

![text you selected](image URL)

Modified image format

You can do that according to the rules in this postenter link description here.

Copying to blog photos folder in drive

I set up links between the Download folder and Google Drive Blog Post folder:

ln -s /mnt/chromeos/GoogleDrive/MyDrive/Media/Blog\ Photos/ blogphotos

ln -s /mnt/chromeos/MyFiles/Downloads/ downloads

So from the Linux shell, I can copy files. For whatever that’s worth.

Blogus interruptus

If I can’t finish a post in one session, I’d like to preserve the tabs without cluttering up my browser. So I can use the OneTab extension to save all the tabs, and then later restore them all at once.

What happens next

Here are some things I want to add to the project—in no particular order:

• Open windows for transcriptions
• Combined editing tool with
• Voice typing (with correction of words like quote/endquote and so on
• StackEdit (JS library)
• Grammarly
• Programmatic replacement of common spellings
• Timeboxing and time notifications

​

Automating AutoBlogger

I started out trying to write a post. Failed.

So I worked on writing a post analyzing my failure.

Failed

Actually, not exactly.

Writing is thinking. I thought a lot about why I had failed. And at last understood why I hadn’t finished the first post, or the second, and many others.

So that was a win.

Why I failed

I had an idea but didn’t have a clear picture of what I wanted to write. So I kept on writing thing after thing, exploring the space, hoping I would find the answer.

I didn’t check to see if I was on track—which would have been hard since I had no track: only a destination, and no road to get there.

I thought some more and looked for other things that often went wrong. Like starting to write something, but not having enough intention to persevere.

I decided that a checklist would help me. So I designed one.

Then I realized that this was not the first time I’d written a blog post complaining about not writing and analyzing my failure to write.

So I went an found the earlier ones I’d written.

Holy crap!

Failure -> learning; learning -> forgetting

I looked back over the many posts I’ve written about my blogging failures. Each one captured a bit of wisdom.

I’d learned from my mistakes. Yay!

Each post had a bit of wisdom, hard-won. And then forgotten.

Or forgotten by my meat brain. But I’m a cyborg. I’d retained the memory in my cyber brain.

Limitations of meat

My meat brain is limited. And aging is making it worse.

But my cyber-brain is—for all practical purposes—unlimited. And technology is making it better.

I’d improved my writing process by picking suitable new technologies and putting them together into a workflow. So why not make that better?

Why not automate more of my writing process.?

And then, I thought: why just writing? I’ve got lots of things that I’ve learned, practiced, and then forgotten. The tools for automating them are at hand. I can learn them.

And then I thought: why not even further automate waking up?

So I started coding something.

And that put me in discovery mode. I discovered a whole new generation of coding tools and techniques that have emerged since the last time I played programmer—just a few years ago.

Down the technology rabbit hole I went. I disappeared for more than a week.

Now I’m back, with a lot of problems solved, a backlog of posts to write, and burning desire to increase my productivity and to use the available technology to overcome some of my biological deficiencies.

AutoBlogger improved

The last time I dove into my blogging workflow, I wrote Authoring, improved, which was an improvement over High productivity blogging workflow. Right? Sure.

Some things stuck. And some things deteriorated. In particular, I lost my ability to use Google voice typing to write drafts.

So here’s Rev 1 of the better process:

I click a button that will:

• Open a tab with a new document—a copy of my blogging template document—and put it into my Google Docs BlogDraft folder
• Open a tab with StackEdit
• Open a tab with Grammarly
• Open a tab with a new post page in Blogger

That would be a great start.

So I built it.

And here’s a video of how it works.

Transcription workflow

Next: When I’m writing a post, I sometimes want to pull quotes from a YouTube video and put them in the post.

Here is the workflow that I have used and that I’m going to automate next.

I made a video of the procedure.

I start with three tabs open: the YouTube video, one for the conversion program (I’m using one called Online Video Converter and one for the transcription program (I’m using otter.ai).

I start in the YouTube tab and select the URL.

I go to the conversion tab and paste it in the conversion program. Then choose format. I’m using mp3. I click and wait. Then click download and it.

Now I go to the Otter tab and import it. And after a while, I have my transcript.

So I used the same programming technique to open the video converter and the transcription program tabs and carry out the rest of the procedure manually. For now, at least.

I’ll post a video of the improved tool, later.

Programming workflow

That’s going to be my next deep dive.

The plan is:

1. Describe each technology that I am using with plusses and minuses
2. Put together a workflow description
3. Solve each problem that I find

​

Metta and dealing with annoying people

Lovingkindness is the goal of metta meditation., sometimes called lovingkindness meditation.

I’ve been doing it for a while as part of the Waking Up Course, and I’m surprised to discover that I have not written about it before. So let me remedy that.

If you want some background on metta, you can check out the link above or read Thich Nhat Hanh Lovingkindness Instructions or
Meditation On Lovingkindness - Jack Kornfield. They all do it pretty much the same way.

Or Sam Harris does differently. They recommend you start by showing loving kindness to yourself. Sam Harris recommends you start with someone with whom you have an “uncomplicated relationship.” I think he’s right to start there. Our relationships with ourselves can be complicated.

So instead of starting with yourself pick someone easy.

Then, having that person clearly in mind, you project intentions like this toward them:

May you be happy. May you be free from suffering. May your dreams be fulfilled.

And stuff like that.

He recommends that you picture them and picture them in a state of happiness. And then become aware of the fact that you really wish them well.

When I do the exercise, I start with my grandkids, because my relationship with them is as uncomplicated as it can be. They’re kids. They’re starting in life. How could I not wish them well?

Then I move to my kids, and Bobbi and then to other people who I care about.

I always end up wishing Donald Trump well. I don’t do it because I like him, but because I don’t.

Metta is good for the world to the degree one’s silent intentions have any effect—probably not at all; but it is good for the mediator—and that is good for the world.

Today Sam Harris specifically suggested that we choose someone who is annoying.

My mind went immediately to a person who lives in my town. I think he is probably the only person in town and possibly in the world who annoys me, which is ridiculous. He’s never done me any real harm.

But he’d annoyed me for years. I’d see him around town and get annoyed. I could say why I found him annoying, but any reasons I gave were inadequate to explain the degree of animus I felt for him.

So I picked him.

And I wished him well.

And tears gushed forth. WTF?

How much energy must have been bound up in wishing him ill for that to happen?

But I wished him well, and I felt freer for it.

Perhaps there are other people toward whom I hold such malign feelings. If so, I want to purge them as well.

If I can wish Donald Trump well, then I can wish anyone well.

And you, future self, or friend, or random stranger reading this:

May you be happy. May you be well. May you be safe. May you be peaceful and at ease.
May you be happy. May you be well. May you be safe. May you be peaceful and at ease.

​