Echelon Front Leadership Training Review
Personal reflections and overview of event content
Introduction
Echelon Front (EF) is a leadership training organization led by retired Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Its training is based on leadership skills, principles, and practices that were developed in war by Willink and Babin and later adapted to address leadership challenges in the business world. EF's training serves leaders in a wide variety of domains including technology, construction, finance, and education. Moreover, EF teaches that leading others is inextricably tied to a demand for self-mastery, a kind of "leadership in oneself." This demand is embodied in the slogan "discipline equals freedom," which Willink is well known for, as well as the bodily training regiments, such as physical conditioning and Jiu-Jitsu classes, that accompany the speeches and leadership exercises at EF's events.
This article reviews EF's Extreme Ownership Muster event, which I attended last month in Nashville, Tennessee. Overall, it was an excellent and impactful event. The event transformed my understanding of what leadership is and instilled in me a genuine desire to become a leader. It provided a wealth of practical knowledge about leadership and presented it within a well thought out and tightly connected conceptual framework. Its teaching was interwoven with deeply personal and memorable stories of military struggle, sacrifice, and camaraderie. These stories served to enrich the event's conceptual teaching as well as to communicate the realities of war and the burden and pain left by fallen soldiers to a degree that I had not experienced before. The event itself was extremely well run and organized. The instructors were generous with their time and were genuinely interested in meeting attendees and learning about their specific leadership challenges. I think that this is an extremely worthwhile event that teams operating in any industry would benefit from attending. I believe that the event will help me advance my mission in business and that it will help me advance my most important mission, which is motivated by a deep concern for the fate of our nation.
The remainder of this article presents a detailed review of the event and an overview of its content. It is divided into three parts. First, I will discuss my motivations for attending the event and some questions that I had before the event. Second, I will discuss the content of the event in detail, including an overview of each of the speeches. Finally, I will reflect on the event and discuss how I think it will impact me and my mission going forward. I will also make some suggested additions to the event. (That is, the second section aims at a fairly objective description of the contents of the event and can be read on its own while the first and third sections relate heavily to my personal mission and would be of most interest to those similarly concerned about the fate of our nation.)
Motivations for Attending
I attended the EF event for business, patriotic, and philosophical reasons.
Business
I have been successfully freelancing for the past few years building AI, machine learning and data science software for startups and small businesses. I am currently in the process of expanding my efforts and building a team. I believed that EF's leadership training would help me learn the skills necessary to clarify my company's mission and to lead my growing team to success. I also thought that the conference would provide a good opportunity to meet other business leaders in the Nashville area, which I moved to about six months ago. My intention was to collaborate with them on technical and business projects as well as to build a community dedicated to improving our personal lives and leadership skills.
The American Crisis
During graduate school I witnessed the growth of a dangerous force within the university - which I will simply describe as aggressive censorship accompanied by passive support for political violence for the purposes of this article. I felt a profound sense of duty to fight and subdue this force and a strong sense of personal responsibility for failing to do so as it spilled out into and engulfed the nation in the late 2010's and early 2020's. EF's principle of extreme ownership, which I had understood as heaping upon oneself a complete, even if unreasonable, sense of responsibility for failure resonated with this sentiment that I felt. (Extreme ownership in fact has a distinct, but not entirely contrary, meaning as I learned at the conference.)
How could I have better led this fight? I had done so primarily by speaking out, attempting to galvanize and instill courage in others, forming and leading organizations, and sacrificing everything I could afford to do so. Moreover, how can I better step up now to lead America out of its continuing crisis? Right now there are many intelligent young people who are disenchanted with or have been effectively exiled from mainstream institutions. I believe that the essential mission and unique capability of this group is to clarify and understand the crisis at a deep and fundamental level, to chart a path forward, and to orient the nation along that path. However, right now, people comprising this group are only loosely connected, have not set a common practical mission, and are not effectively working with other Americans who are similarly concerned about the fate of our nation but have a distinct role to play in its revival. How can I lead efforts among this group and how can I build bridges with other groups of patriotic Americans?
In addition to helping me learn to lead efforts among this group, I believed that attending the EF event would provide essential insight into the current crisis for two reasons. The first has to do with its connection to Jocko Willink. I see Willink as a great American for his military service and for the work he's done to fortify the nation domestically. He has, through the Jocko Podcast and other mediums, advanced virtues like courage, discipline, and self-mastery that are severely lacking today and has additionally projected strong views on the purpose of life that counteract the apathy that dominates today. Moreover, he has done so with a unique spirit and intensity that has captivated many people and sincerely inspired them to better their lives. While I am not into celebrities, I felt that it would be an honor to meet Willink at the conference. Moreover, I believed that doing so would help me better understand what makes him so unique and what understanding of life and America animates him. I believed that such an understanding might provide essential insight into the nature of the current crisis and might reorient me on my mission in some fundamental way.
The second reason has to do with the event's connection to Jiu-Jitsu, which I began training about two years ago. Since I train Jiu-Jitsu, I was naturally interested in and curious about its inclusion in a leadership conference. What is the unifying force that holds together EF's seemingly disparate teachings on leadership, the cultivation of fortifying virtues, patriotism rooted in reverence for military sacrifice, and martial arts training? My curiosity in the unifying power of martial arts was amplified by an interview I had seen in which Willink said that "Jiu-Jitsu, for me, was the connective tissue that started to join my mind with all the different aspects of my life.... I don't think I would be doing anything that I'm doing right now [(presumably including leadership training)] if it wasn't for Jiu-Jitsu."
I felt that better understanding the scope of the benefits of martial arts would help me in my mission, part of which is devoted to an investigation into how martial arts training can help strengthen America. This will be the subject of a forthcoming article, but some questions that I am investigating are as follows. At a concrete level, can widespread martial arts training help citizens defend themselves, particularly against the rising political and criminal violence, and can it help develop fortifying virtues like courage and discipline? At a more experimental level, I am investigating the value of martial arts in two capacities. First, can martial arts training be used as a template for training citizens to defend and preserve freedom domestically by, for example, training them to engage in controversial debates, to overcome fear, and to tolerate social and professional repercussions for their speech? Moreover, is there an analogous art that accompanies this training, a kind of patriotic art whose aim is not physical self defense but rather a kind of national sociopolitical defense? Second, taking my bearing from the widely recognized mind-body connection inherent in martial arts, can martial arts shed light on the more general phenomenon of the relation between thinking and reality, or how thinking is fundamentally able to grasp and interface with reality? Firmly grasping this interface is, I believe, essential for deep and true political thinking which I see as necessary for overcoming the current crisis.
Political Philosophy
After graduate school, I began an independent study of political philosophy in an attempt to understand the crisis at a deeper level. Within the political chaos, it seemed like nobody had any answers. Things kept unraveling, continually defying explanation and prediction, as well as any attempt to control them. The concepts that kept popping up to make sense of politics, like "woke" and "generation gap," and even ideas like the left-right political spectrum that are central to political discourse, always seemed to obscure, rather than to truly grasp, political reality. I found seemingly scientific approaches, such as statistical analyses, similarly insufficient, often veiling their inability to grasp political reality with the appearance of rigor. I found myself seeking a deeper and genuine understanding, sober and clear thinking, something more stable and permanent to latch onto. Political philosophy offered this promise. "Political philosophy is the attempt truly to know both the nature of political things and the right, or the good, political order," writes Leo Strauss (1899-1973) a preeminent twentieth-century political philosopher.
The quest for knowledge of the good political order inevitably leads us on a quest for a comprehensive understanding of human life, to questions about the essence of man and what it means to live a good life. Political philosophy thus takes us far beyond what we think of as "politics" today (typically policies, laws, elections, and accompanying debates). In so doing, it immediately confronts us with the question of how we are able to gain access to (or to properly pursue) political wisdom. The fact that this is not merely an intellectual matter has been demonstrated spectacularly by today's universities, within which the greatest political ignorance grew alongside the greatest severing of the intellect from the totality of human life.
Instead, our quest for political wisdom leads us to ask the following questions: what life experiences must we acquire in order to properly pursue this wisdom? How do we need to train our whole selves for this pursuit? Who among us has the best understanding of life and what can we learn by talking to and questioning him? It was this quest that attracted me to the EF event in which I saw important contrasts to the modern world: intimate experience with war, the focus on a holistic training of man (in virtues, patriotism, martial arts, business, and leadership), and a unique understanding of life that I suspect animates their teachings (which I had suggested above in reference to Willink's fame). I believed that attending the event would provide important insight into the nature of man, and hence insight into the good political order and the philosophical underpinnings of the current crisis.
I was further motivated to attend the event to investigate some similarities that I recognized between the teachings of EF and the ancient Greeks. Ancient Greek political philosophy furnishes us with a comprehensive view of politics that focuses on the cultivation of human excellence. It also furnishes us with a preeminent exemplar of the quest for political wisdom in the life of Socrates. Socrates, in Plato's Republic, teaches that the pursuit of wisdom demands education of the full human soul, which requires not only training one's intellect, but also training in music and gymnastic (physical fitness, wrestling, training for war), as well as the cultivation of virtues like courage (to confront painful things) and moderation (to resist indulgence in pleasure). I see the comprehensive nature of education and the promotion of virtues like courage and discipline echoed in EF's teaching. Is this connection genuine and does it run deeper? Does it indicate a kind of rediscovery of ancient ideals in the modern world? If so, is this rediscovery part of a wider cultural phenomenon, especially among those calling to cultivate virtues like courage to counteract the cowardice that dominates today?
I also saw in EF's leadership teaching echoes of more specific ancient teachings. To give one example, there seems to be a strong similarity between the notion of ruling presented by Socrates in Plato's Republic and the notion of leadership taught by EF. For Socrates, the notion of ruling is a kind of supreme principle, one necessary to understand the best political order, the proper order of the human soul, and the intimate relationship between the two. Socrates teaches that the city can not be freed from its ills unless it is ruled by the best men. The best man is the one whose soul is properly ordered, meaning that it is ruled by its best part, the part that pursues the highest aims of the soul. Similarly, EF raises leadership to a kind of supreme principle, one that governs the organization of a team as well as the organization of one's life, a kind of "leadership in oneself." As EF's event page states: "victory cannot be achieved without leadership, which is why we say leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, the most important thing in business, and the most important thing in life."
Moreover, EF's leadership teaching was developed in response to the realities of war. Similarly, war figures heavily into Socrates' teaching in the Republic, where the constant threat of war is the central concern of the city that he develops in speech. Consequently, the city's need to properly educate and train its guardian, or warrior, class is the impetus that guides his entire political teaching. (Socrates himself was a respected veteran of war, receiving praise for his courage by two Athenian generals in Plato's Laches, for example.) Are certain political truths accessible only to those who intimately comprehend the realities of war, which most of the ancients (like Socrates) did and which most of EF's instructors do, but which most moderns do not? Does this modern alienation from war explain, in part, the modern alienation from ancient truths, and hence the current crisis?
Conference Description
This section provides a brief overview of the event followed by a summary of each of its speeches. (It is based on detailed hand-written notes that I took during the conference though I also used the workbook distributed by EF at the event for reference. I believe that I captured the central ideas of each speech fairly accurately though I may have made some mistakes in the details.)
Overview
The event was fairly large, attracting about one thousand attendees from 39 states, 5 countries, and 42 industries, by EF's report. Many attendees came in groups and seemed to be coworkers at small- to medium-sized companies. I met a few individuals who came on their own, such as an out of state police officer who had been to nine such EF events, feeling that past events had greatly helped his personal life, and a local elementary school teacher who reads Willink's children books to her class and had brought a huge bag of them for him to sign, which he gladly did. (The mix of attendees was somewhat of a surprise to me. I had expected more brazenly patriotic or intense people who I had envisioned to be the most dedicated listeners of the Jocko Podcast. Instead it felt more like the kind of crowd that would attend a typical corporate leadership retreat.)
There were many tables advertising other EF events, selling books, and offering free samples of Jocko Fuel. EF also had several partnerships. One such partnership was with America's Mighty Warriors, an organization run by Debbie Lee, mother of Marc Lee, who was killed in Iraq while serving alongside Willink and Babin. Her organization's mission is to support Gold Star Families as well as veterans by providing housing and other help for those with PTSD or facing other struggles. Another partnership was with Combat Ready, a European-based company that teaches principles similar to EF's and that had representatives from Estonia and other Eastern European countries volunteering at the event.
The event consisted of a meet-and-greet on the first night, followed by two days of speeches, physical fitness at 5 AM on both days (which I did not attend), and a Jiu-Jitsu class on the final day (which I did attend). Willink and Babin headlined the event, speaking many times throughout the event, and were supported by about fifteen other EF instructors. Most of the instructors had military background, including several who had served alongside Willink and Babin, and then went on to overcome significant challenges in their business or personal lives. Yet, the conference was not merely a collection of speeches broadly about leadership and its applicability to business and personal life delivered by ex-military personnel (which is somewhat closer to what I had anticipated). Instead a strong conceptual, thematic, and dramatic harmony tied the event together making it feel like one coherent and engaging exposition spanning the two days.
Conceptually, EF developed a comprehensive language for articulating their leadership principles which were fit together in a well thought out and tightly connected conceptual framework. What I had presumed to be a set of loosely connected slogans, like "extreme ownership" or "discipline equals freedom," are in fact elements of this framework. "Extreme ownership," for example, is the centerpiece of this framework while the seemingly contradictory phrase "discipline equals freedom" exemplifies a fundamental tension or dichotomy inherent in leadership. (Extreme Ownership and The Dichotomy of Leadership are the central books in which EF's leadership framework is articulated, though I had not read these before the event.) Thematically, the event's presentation of leadership principles was tightly interwoven with stories of military experience, and particularly with stories of military sacrifice. The sequence of stories largely follows a narrative of Willink and Babin's time through the SEAL Teams. Dramatically, each of the speeches was well delivered, engaging, and authentic. Many of the speeches were delivered by two or more instructors who interleaved teachings and stories in a well coordinated fashion that exemplified the kind of teamwork that EF teaches. Transitions between the speeches ran smoothly over the backdrop of pertinent and dramatic video content, primarily from the Jocko Podcast.
The Supreme Importance of Leadership
Willink and Babin co-delivered the introductory speech, presenting some of conference's central themes and setting its tone. They discussed the central importance of leadership and their military experiences that informed their insights into the nature of effective leadership. The speech centered on their time in Iraq with Task Unit Bruiser. Willink was Bruiser's Commander while Babin and Seth Stone (who figures heavily into the narrative throughout the conference) each commanded one of Bruiser's two platoons. (Babin and Stone reported to Willink.) During this time, as an elite special operations force working alongside the Marines, they accomplished much good, saving many American lives and advancing the cause in Iraq. They also brought a lot of good home: lessons of humility, ownership, teamwork, brotherhood, and leadership. But they also brought home a tremendous burden and pain: that while they came home they did not bring all of their men home. This is a burden and pain that never goes away and it is one that is clearly and authentically felt throughout the entire conference.
The speech opens dramatically with the tragic death of Bruiser's Michael Monsoor and Stone's heroic attempt to save him. During battle in Iraq, Monsoor threw himself on top of an enemy grenade, absorbing its blast and saving the lives of three of his teammates but sustaining serious injuries himself. Monsoor later died from his injuries and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery and sacrifice. In response to the blast, Stone had led a team of SEALs in an attempt to save Monsoor, overcoming significant challenges and exhibiting true leadership. Yet Stone's leadership was not innate. Although he was intelligent, tough, and brave, Stone understood that leadership itself is a skill that must be learned. He was humble and had taken significant efforts to learn leadership over the preceding eighteen months.
Willink and Babin maintain that leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, as evidenced by Stone's heroic effort to save Monsoor, by the macro-level war in Iraq, and by a wealth of historical examples from ancient to modern times. In Iraq, for example, the quality of enemy leadership had a dramatic effect on the difficulty of battle. Initially, the enemy was disorganized, composed largely of thugs and criminals, but after the 2006 Insurgency, the enemy was better organized and led and the battle became a lot harder.
Willink began to recognize the importance of effective leadership as well as some of its fundamental principles during his time as a young SEAL. Such principles include the importance of being able to step back from a chaotic situation as well as from your ego, the importance of alignment in a team's mission, and the power of humility in a leader. This final lesson he learned from a legendary SEAL named Delta Charlie who had served as his platoon commander. Prior to Charlie, Willink's platoon had a terrible leader: he had a huge ego, barked orders, imposed his plan, had no respect for the troops, and was eventually fired. But Charlie was the exact opposite: he was humble, genuinely looked forward to working with the platoon, listened to what they had to say, and respected them. This inspired in Willink a strong respect for Charlie and strong desire to never let him down.
Willink and Babin came to recognize the supreme importance of leadership after successfully leading Bruiser for many years and noticing how regularly its performance was complimented. They also came to recognize distinct principles and practices that they had developed and employed within Bruiser but had not yet articulated. Central to Bruiser's success was a culture of Extreme Ownership, the four Laws of Combat (discussed in the next section), the recognition that leadership is a skill that must be trained, and the recognition that leadership is a responsibility of everyone, not just of the platoon commander but also of the front line SEAL who takes full ownership over his part of the mission. Willink and Babin used these principles to train new SEAL teams and eventually adapted them to teach leadership to the civilian world with EF, a company that they co-founded in 2011.
The Laws of Combat
Babin exposited the four Laws of Combat - Cover and Move, Simplicity, Prioritize and Execute, and Decentralize Command - with the help of four EF instructors. For each law, Babin gave a brief explanation of its applicability in combat and business. One of the other instructors then entered the stage to explain it in more detail using examples from his or her own life.
Cover and Move embodies the notions of teamwork and relationship building. On the battlefield, it refers to the act of laying down suppressive fire so that other teammates can safely maneuver. It embodies a recognition of the importance of the overall success of your team and mission over your own success, and a recognition of the strength of your relationship, of preserving the life of a friend. EF instructor Andrew Paul illustrated this principle. Paul served in Bruiser then went on to work in the mortgage industry where he experienced significant friction between loan officers, who wanted loan applications to be accepted, and underwriters, who were highly critical of the applications. This friction dissipated only when Paul was able to build personal relationships and trust, key principles of Cover and Move, between members of the two groups. He was eventually able to get more loans approved and advance the overall mission of his organization.
Simplicity seems like an obvious principle but it is easy to overlook. During his time as a platoon leader, Babin's team failed to execute one mission that he had organized, even though they had all listened attentively and wanted to win. He realized that the problem was that his plan was too complex. This taught him that a plan must be simple, clear, and concise. Moreover, he learned that the best way for a leader to ensure that his team truly understands his plan is to ask the team to explain it back to him rather than to simply ask if anyone has any questions, to which they will often say "no," despite not truly understanding the plan. EF instructor Meg Miller illustrated the importance of simplicity utilizing examples from her time coaching college lacrosse. During this time, Miller recognized that in high stress situations, such as when a team was down by one goal near the end of the game, coaches that called out complex plays often caused their teams to lose. In contrast, while coaching one high stakes game in overtime, she called out a simple and familiar play to the her team. The team was so happy because they knew it so well. It broke the stress and allowed them to execute it perfectly and win.
Prioritize and Execute refers to the dual task of identifying what is most important in a situation (prioritizing) and overcoming internal difficulties necessary to execute it. But prioritizing is difficult. People tend to look down the barrel of their own gun, not at the whole situation. The primary challenge to seeing the whole picture and prioritizing is the ability to emotionally detach from a situation and look around. It is important to recognize that detachment does not come naturally but instead must be explicitly practiced and trained. EF instructor Corey Mize illustrated this difficulty. Mize had heard the phrase "prioritize and execute" many times before she was forced to seriously put it into action. When Mize got into a dangerous car crash, she became emotionally overwhelmed and was initially unable to act. However, her practice detaching from her emotions led her to make good decisions including making the necessary call for help. Although some decisions may seem obvious, the blinders of chaos prevent you from seeing even the most obvious decisions which only become visible when you detach from the situation.
Decentralize Command means that everybody leads, from the squad leader to the front line troop who is in charge of himself and his part of the mission. A squad leader cannot be everywhere to command at all times, nor can he develop a plan that anticipates all of the contingencies that will arise in a real life scenario. Rather than communicating how a team should execute a mission, the leader should communicate why they are doing it. This will allow each team member to better understand his role and to figure out how to execute it, perhaps discovering a superior way that the leader had not envisioned. EF instructor Cordell Bennigson illustrated this principle. Bennigson was a U.S. Marine Corps Officer and pilot who went on to run several companies. One such company made critical equipment for police officers and was significantly impacted by the COVID lock downs. In particular, Bennigson was no longer able to easily travel from his home to the factory. Nevertheless, because all of his workers understood why their piece of the job was important, they were able to organize and lead on their own, never missing a single shipment and even innovating their procedures during this difficult time.
The Dichotomy of Leadership
While many leadership principles, such as the Laws of Combat, are easy to understand, they are difficult to implement, as Willink and Babin discussed. Two fundamental difficulties inhibit their practical application. First, inherent in leadership itself is a tension, a dichotomy between two extremes that the leader must balance. Second, finding this balance often requires that the leader act in a way that is contrary to his natural instincts. The key to overcoming these difficulties is the insight that leadership is a skill. As such, the necessary balance and instincts can be cultivated and improved through training and practical experience.
Effective leadership, though guided by certain principles, must also be moderated by a balance that prevents any one principle from being taken too far in a given situation. A leader must be disciplined but not tyrannical, aggressive but not reckless, humble but not passive, resolute but not overbearing. Being resolute but not overbearing, for example, requires you to know when to hold the line and enforce an order, but also when to pull back a little bit and not do so.
Two complimentary examples from Bruiser illustrate this dichotomy. In one instance, Willink had ordered his men to learn how to program the battlefield radios, which help prevent friendly fire incidents. But Babin had not prioritized this order among his platoon whose members were consequently unable to program the radios when questioned by Willink. In the other instance, Babin and Stone defied Willink's order against wearing decorative patches on their uniforms. The patches, though common in SEAL culture as a mark of self expression, would clash with the Army's culture of professionalism and impede collaboration among the forces, Willink felt. The first order Willink recognized as essential (necessary to protect the lives of his men) and enforced it, making everyone to learn how to program the radios immediately. The second order, however, he recognized as overbearing, as evidenced by his trusted teammates' defiance of it, and did not enforce it. Making this decision required humility to keep his ego, which is typically hurt whenever a subordinate defies an order, in check.
This example illustrates a more general principle: that balancing any leadership dichotomy is not only conceptually difficult but often requires us to act contrary to our instincts. It is our instinct to be passive rather than to take action, to oppose change rather than to adopt innovation, to protect our ego rather than to be humble, to cast blame on others rather than to take ownership. Yet overcoming these instincts is essential for effective leadership: humility is the most important quality in a leader and a culture of extreme ownership is what most strongly predicts a team's victory.
These two supremacy claims are supported by empirical observations and by theoretical explanation. First, a leader's ego is the primary source of leadership problems in the business world, as EF recognized from its extensive experience diagnosing such problems. This is explained partly by the omnipresence of the ego whose demands consistently threaten to undermine the demands of effective leadership, such as performing honest self-assessments and building good relationships with your team. Humility is necessary to keep the ego in check, as the above example with the patches illustrates. Second, ownership is the attitude that most significantly differentiates winning from losing teams in SEAL training exercises, as Willink and Babin observed. This is explained partly by the fact that ownership is implicitly necessary to cultivate tactical excellence, by forcing the team to continuously make small improvements, and partly by the fact that taking ownership is necessary to stop the corrosive spread of blame within the team. It is our instinct to cast blame on others for our failures, but it is also their instinct to evade this blame by casting it upon someone else. Only when someone steps up and takes ownership does the blame stop spreading.
Own your Attitude
EF instructor and former Marine Rob Jones lost both of his legs in an IED explosion performing his duty of sweeping for mines, a duty that he loved as it allowed him to protect his fellow Marines in a way that none of the others could. While recovering from his injury, Jones recognized the importance of managing his attitude and that of his loved ones traumatized by his injury. He regularly wore silly hats, such as a pirate hat, in his hospital bed in an attempt to do so. After his recovery, he chose to live his life in a way that showed that he had not been broken by war but instead that he had become stronger by it. He intended to combat the transformation of the popular perception of veterans that he had witnessed over lifetime: from that of noble hero to that of the broken hero, a victim traumatized by war. Jones' mission led him to run an astonishing 31 marathons in 31 different cities on 31 consecutive days. He teaches the importance of owning your attitude, especially when your life is radically disrupted, to honestly assess the truth of your situation and to accept it.
Know Your Mission
EF Chief Training Officer and former SEAL JP Dinnell taught the importance of clearly defining your mission. Though successful as a SEAL, Dinnell struggled with his personal life after leaving the military. As a SEAL, he had a clearly defined mission and, under the command of Willink and Stone, he was embedded within a culture of extreme ownership. After leaving the military, Dinnell got married and had children but failed to maintain good relations with his wife who ultimately served him divorce papers. The key problem, Dinnell recognized, was that he had failed to clearly define his mission in post-military life and to pursue its victory with the necessary intensity. Through an honest self-assessment, he recognized that getting his family back was his most important mission. He was ultimately victorious in this mission, a success that he attributes to his embrace of the principle of extreme ownership (which he had embraced in the military but had not thought to apply to his personal life until Willink and Babin's book was published) and to his having waged a daily war against complacency (a principle which he had also embraced in the military, having taken the sarcastic slogan "the enemy thanks you for not giving 100% today" to heart).
Military experience again provides a unique vantage point for clarifying fundamental problems in business and life as well as their solutions. Here, it brings into clarity the importance of having a mission, of knowing who or what your enemy is, and of asking what victory looks like. Moreover, in the chaos of life, as in the chaos of battle, you will often get off your path and lose track of your mission. To restore clarity to your mission, you must remind yourself and your team why you are doing what you are doing.
The Power of Relationships and Leadership Capital
Willink and Babin taught the power of relationships and introduced the principle of leadership capital. During initial EF engagements with companies, EF recognized that many people did not understand what a good relationship is, often mistaking it for something trivial like regularly saying "hi" to someone in the hallway. EF subsequently identified five essential components of a relationship - trust, listening, respect, influence, and care - each of which has a fundamentally reciprocal nature: to gain influence over others, you must open your mind to be influenced by them, for example. Moreover, from their extensive corporate engagements, they identified the ego as the primary barrier that prevents a leader from taking the actions necessary to build good relationships.
The strength and dynamic of the relationship between a leader and his subordinates is characterized as leadership capital. Actions like listening to them, using their plan, or pointing out that they're right is akin to a deposit of capital, while contrary actions are akin to a withdrawal of capital. Willink stressed that most leaders do not understand how precious leadership capital is: you have much less leadership capital than you think. As such, it is necessary to make deposits as often as possible, by going out of your way to build trust or to use a subordinate's plan, for example.
EF instructor Carlos Mendez illustrated the power of relationship building using examples from his time with the SEALs and from his time employed as an investment banker after leaving the military. As a SEAL, his team regularly struggled to acquire the necessary approval from an army general to approve their desired air strikes. The problem, Mendez recognized, was not a technical flaw in his team's plans, but rather the quality of his team's relationship with the general. By building trust, showing respect, carefully listening, and applying the principle of reciprocal influence, Mendez built a strong relationship with the general who then more willing approved the strikes. As an investment banker, he sought to change his office culture which was dominated by lazy employees. Rather than blaming lazy coworkers, he built relationships with them by taking an interest in their personal lives and asking them what he could do to make their jobs easier. This influenced them to step up and do their jobs better. With relationship building, Mendez urges you to do it because you genuinely care, not as a trick.
Counterintuitive Leadership and the Indirect Approach
Willink taught that leadership is counterintuitive, often requiring an indirect approach. He introduces the archetype of the silent leader as the epitome of the indirect approach. Rather than being loud or giving excessively detailed orders, the silent leader will use merely a word, a gesture, a head nod, a look, or even say nothing at all. The silent leader is able to command such respect and diligent execution from his team due to the relationship he has built with them. Moreover, this relationship building itself often requires an indirect approach. After recognizing a flaw in a subordinate's plan, for example, the leader should not directly say that the plan is bad or flawed but should instead ask the subordinate questions about the plan that prompts him to recognize the flaw on his own. The minimal effort required to manage the team allows the leader to look out at the future rather than looking down at and managing his team.
Detachment is a Superpower
EF instructor and former US Marine Codey Gandy leads EF's hands-on training which is a practical application of the principles that it teaches. While many of EF's leadership principles are easy to understand, they are difficult to implement. The biggest barrier to implementation for most people is the inability to detach, to not let your ego, your perspective, or your emotions dictate your actions but instead to calmly step back, to clearly assess your situation, and to Prioritize and Execute. Detachment does not come naturally to most people and instead must be diligently practiced and trained. Yet once honed, your ability to detach acts like a superpower, facilitating your ability to implement all of EF's leadership principles and effectively lead. Moreover, since leadership is a kind of universal skill that applies to all areas of life, your ability to detach effectively dictates your ability to solve problems in all areas of your life.
Accountability versus Ownership
EF instructor and retired SEAL Sean Glass spoke about accountability in military and corporate contexts. While performing corporate consulting through EF, Glass often hears employees complain that others are not held accountable. Yet when he asks them what they've done to help their teammates, the answer is often "nothing," to which he rhetorically asks "by doing nothing are you helping your team?" Rather than demanding that others be held accountable, you should take ownership of the situation and ask what you can do to help that person and to help your team. Glass warns against taking this position on accountability too far. It does not mean that you should never fire anyone, but instead that you will often not need to as they will often get better when you begin to take ownership. He illustrates this point with an example from his military days when he stepped up to mentor a younger soldier who was initially struggling but then went on to become a great platoon commander.
Tactical versus Strategic Thinking
Willink and Babin emphasized the need to recognize and contrast tactical (short-term) and strategic (long-term) thinking. In particular, they warn against the mistake of believing that a series of tactical victories will lead to overall victory. In Iraq, for example, their tactical thinking amounted to targeting and killing individual bad guys. But these short-term victories actually amounted to a long-term loss as more bad guys would continually pop up. Only when their tactical thinking shifted to strategic thinking, of helping marines secure the local populace, did the war begin to turn around. In the business world, EF sees this error all the time. For example, they consulted a construction company that set and completed daily tactical goals. Senior management, hearing of these daily victories, erroneously concluded that the project was going great when in fact it was severely off track. Another common problem occurs when people focus on making money (tactical victory) at the expense of their family relationships (strategic loss).
This concluded the speeches from the first day.
Planning
Willink and Babin opened the speeches on the second day with a discussion of the importance of delegating planning to a subordinate, a concept known as "leading from the rear." Rather than giving your subordinate a plan (telling him how to execute it) it is much better to communicate to him why you want him to execute it and to let him make his own plan. Even if your plan is a little better on paper, you should still go with his plan for several reasons: his team has already bought into the plan, when difficulties arise they are more easily able to adapt, they feel empowered and in control over their own destinies, and your subordinate learns to take over your job as leader. If his plan needs to be improved, ask him questions about it until he figures out how to improve it himself (take the indirect approach). Overruling his plan will cost you significant leadership capital and should only be done if his plan will get people killed.
Iterative Decision Making
Willink and EF instructor David Berke, a retired US Marine Corps Officer and pilot, discussed practical decision making. The discussion centers around twentieth-century pilot John Boyd's OODA loop, a decision making process containing four stages: Observe, requiring you to go into "receive" mode to actively acquire information, Orient, requiring you to interpret observations accounting for biases and other factors, Decide, requiring you to overcome uncertainty and make a decision, and Act, requiring you to execute the decision to test your hypothesis. These stages are executed in a loop, continuously incorporating feedback, until the mission is complete.
There are two primary reasons that the decision making process fails: getting stuck and denying feedback. Getting stuck is a kind of "analysis paralysis" where you wait to acquire every last bit of information before making a decision. One effective way to overcome this paralysis is to shrink the scope of your decision. Instead of making one large decision, make small decisions very quickly, get feedback, then iterate. Denying feedback occurs when you are blinded, often by your ego, to reject feedback. A common example is when people ship a product that they love but will not listen to market feedback, often blaming the ignorance of the consumer for not understanding their vision.
Training
Willink and Babin discussed the effectiveness of training. They differentiated between formal and informal training. A formal training procedure must have three components: it must be realistic, focus on the fundamentals (which do not change by time or situation), and be repetitive. Its goal is to replicate the stress and other factors of the real situation such that the real situation is easy. However, formal training is time consuming and may be difficult to do for each situation. Instead, in business, you should focus on informal, or on-the-fly, training. A good leader should always be looking for opportunities to informally train his people, such as by telling the new guy to come up with a safety plan for the site. Even if he has had no formal training to do so, he can make his best attempt, then get feedback and improve.
The power and effectiveness of formal training was demonstrated numerous times on the battlefield, to life-saving effect. During one mission in Ramadi, Stone was pinned down by machine gun fire. Despite the fact that it was his first firefight, he was able to lead his men to safety due to his excellent training, a point that shocked an observing Army Major who had thought that Stone must have had significant urban combat experience. EF Instructor Jason Gardner, who spent 30 years in the SEAL Teams, related additional stories that illustrated the power of training. In one mission, he was trapped in a minefield with a severely wounded SEAL and his team's training helped get the wounded SEAL back to safety and saved his life. Several times in Iraq, Gardner led a team that nearly committed a blue-on-blue killing, an accidental shooting of a teammate. He believes that these near-killings would have actually occurred had it not been for his team's training, and in particular a simulated blue-on-blue kill that occurred on his watch in one training mission. Crucially, Gardner credits Willink and Babin for reforming their SEAL training to make it more realistic, a task that they were uniquely equipped to do after their return from Ramadi in which they had experienced the most sustained urban combat of any SEALs since Vietnam.
To apply the idea of military training to business, Gardner advises that leaders develop training procedures that simulate the worst case scenario for their industry, such as dealing with a belligerent customer, and that make the training as realistic as possible. Moreover, while leaders often complain that it is hard to find good people to hire, they should instead recognize that they can actually make good people through training.
Unified Strategic Goals
Willink discussed the importance of a leader's unifying his team under a common strategic goal, especially when there is a conflict over resources. Such a conflict is common in both military and business scenarios. For example, Bruiser was composed of two platoons but a limited number of night vision goggles. Similarly, Willink's Origin clothing company is composed of teams making different types of clothing, such as Jiu-Jitsu gis and jeans, but a limited advertising budget. Naturally, each platoon wanted as many night vision goggles as it could get and each clothing team wants as many advertising dollars as it can get. When one group demands additional resources, remind that group of the overall mission of the organization and ask them if taking additional resources away from the other group will help the mission or not. More generally, each person or sub-team will have its own agenda and pursue a different path. Contrary to what many leaders believe, this is actually okay as long as the leader is able to keep everyone aligned with the overall mission.
Barriers to Extreme Ownership
EF COO Jamie Cochran discussed common barriers that individuals and organizations face in adopting the principle of extreme ownership. These barriers often take the form of objections, fears, uncertainties, or the adoption of defensive postures. The following examples illustrate each of these barriers as well as how to overcome them. While some object that the principles of combat leadership do not apply in the business world, EF has worked with many companies and individuals who employed them with success. While many leaders fear that they will lose respect if they take ownership, in practice the opposite happens: people respect them more and begin to take ownership themselves. While many people are unsure how to begin taking ownership, there are dozens of small opportunities each day with which they can begin. While some people verbally take ownership they don't really mean it, such as teammates sarcastically saying "you gotta take ownership" to each other after attending an EF event rather than sincerely taking ownership. Cochran concluded with examples of extreme ownership in action, highlighting the story of the wife of Brendan Looney, a SEAL who had served with Cochran's husband and was tragically killed in a helicopter crash. Looney's wife now works to help and support other Gold Star Families.
Leadership Challenges
Willink and Babin discussed various challenges associated with leadership and how to overcome them. Different but complementary challenges arise in each phase of your leadership journey, from your beginning as a subordinate or follower, to your transitioning into a leadership role, and finally to your time as a leader. As a subordinate, you must learn how to deal with a boss who is micromanaging, indecisive, or weak. The general approach that you should take is to try to make your boss look good as this will eventually benefit you and your team. In transitioning to a leadership role, you must actively step up and take on this new responsibility. It is greedy to take the easy way out and to avoid this responsibility when you know you are capable and can help your team. As a leader, you must constantly build relationships, subordinate your ego, and give orders using the absolute minimum force required.
Military experience again provides a unique vantage point for addressing leadership problems in the business world, in particular with unmotivated personnel. In the military there are no simple ways to motivate a person as there are in the business world, through promotions or bonuses, for example. Instead, to motivate an unmotivated person, Willink and Babin would put him in charge of some task. This person would often step up to the task, so long as the task is important and not something demeaning or trivial. Moreover, a lack of motivation is often due to a subordinate's not believing in the job or cause. Draftees during the Vietnam War were an extreme example of this. While bad leaders did not like their draftees, good leaders, like Colonel David Hackworth, loved their draftees because they pushed back and asked difficult questions, forcing them to step up and genuinely lead. (Hackworth's book About Face, which details his experiences during the Vietnam War and his leadership mentality, greatly influenced Willink and Babin.)
Assessments
EF instructor and former SEAL Steve Ward spoke about the importance of performing honest assessments, which serve not only to directly improve performance but also to reduce friction among the team. Assessment should occur at the team and individual level and should establish itself within the culture of your organization. As a team, you should explicitly set aside time for assessment and encourage each individual to debrief himself. As an individual, you should be your own harshest critic by asking if you hold yourself to the same standards that you hold others to and by taking ownership of your failures. The ego, again, is the primary barrier to taking ownership and performing an honest self-assessment. A trusted advisor can help you determine if your assessment is honest, as can a self-observation of your use of qualifying words like "maybe."
Ward relates a story about his failure to take ownership during his time as a SEAL. After losing his night vision goggles on a mission, he was questioned by his boss about the missing gear. He got overly emotional and entrapped by his ego which caused him to give dismissive answers, damaging his relationship with his boss and hindering his development as a soldier. Instead, he should have explained the problem, described the consequences, taken ownership, and provided a solution by saying, for example, "I know I didn't do a good job with this task. I will develop a lessons learned document so that others don't make the same mistakes in the future."
Implementation
Willink and Babin concluded the event's speeches with an exhortation to implement the leadership principles taught over the past two days. Their biggest fear of hosting this event is that people will get fired up but then relax and never implement its teachings. They again emphasized that leadership is a skill that requires constant effort and training to perfect but they also offered some advice to begin implementation. They advise that teams utilize the common language developed by EF, such as the Laws of Combat, which will help the team discuss and diagnose problems. They warn about the danger of overcorrection, which occurs, for example, when someone embraces their principle of bias for action in an extreme and aggressive manner. They further advised leaders to own their shortcomings and to explicitly tell their teams that they intend to lead differently rather than to subtly change their behaviors. If a leader has been a persistent micromanager, for example, he should tell his team that he recognizes that his micromanagement has been hurting the team and that he intends to begin to lead differently. Most importantly, a leader must realize that leadership implementation begins with him. If he take ownership and begins to lead, the team will follow.
Jiu-Jitsu Class
The event concluded with a Jiu-Jitsu class. The class was supposed to be held at the hotel but this was not possible due to an issue with the transportation of EF's mats from California. Instead, Nashville MMA generously stepped up to loan their facilities to the group. About 100 to 150 people attended the class encompassing a wide range of experience levels, with about half having never trained Jiu-Jitsu before and with a good mixture of belt-levels, including several black belts, among the experienced half. The class was led by Willink, Echo Charles, co-host of the Jocko Podcast, and Dean Lister, a world champion grappler and Willink's long-time training partner. It began with instruction on several Jiu-Jitsu inspired self-defense moves, such as breaking free from an attacker's grip, which were demonstrated by the instructors then drilled by the group in pairs. The group then split into two. The inexperienced half joined Willink for additional introductory exercises and the experienced half joined Lister for more advanced exercises, centering around a system of leg attacks which he is often credited with pioneering in elite competition, followed by free sparring. (Ironically, it was through Lister that I discovered the EF event. While training leg locks in Louisiana two years ago, someone at my gym mentioned Lister and his connection with Willink. This inspired me to do more research into Willink, quickly discovering the Jocko Podcast and eventually discovering EF.)
Reflection
My reflection on the event will roughly follow the division in which I presented my motivations for attending, into personal, patriotic, and philosophical sections. Each section will address a successively expanding scope of concern and will roughly operate under the guidance of an associated question. First, how was the conference beneficial to me and my immediate goals? Second, how did the conference help me advance my mission in service of the American cause (and how can it help others with a similar mission)? Finally, in what ways did the conference shed light on the philosophical underpinnings of the American crisis?
Personal
The event gave me a fundamentally new understanding of leadership. I came to see leadership as a kind of untapped power, one that could be the key to making projects that I had previously thought infeasible now feasible. I came to appreciate the complexities of effective leadership and consequently the ease with which leadership can be misunderstood, distorted, and poorly implemented. Moreover, I came to appreciate the dictum that leadership is a skill, one that must be actively trained and honed over time to realize its full potential. Yet far more important than any promise of power or utility, the event showed me that leadership is a good and noble art (or skill) and consequently that its mastery is worthy of pursuit. That is, it instilled in me a genuine desire to become a leader.
The noble view of leadership that I acquired contrasts sharply with the views of leadership that I had previously held. Throughout my life, I had seen leadership as a kind of utilitarian-directed management and had regarded the desire to become a leader as essentially ignoble. Initially, having been captivated by scientific pursuits, I saw the prospect of leading such projects as the avoidance of "real work," a retreat from the lab to the manager's office, severing one's ability to grasp reality (through experiment and thinking), and divorcing oneself from the inventive human spirit that such a quest inspired. Turning - or having been turned - toward political matters, I saw leadership as menial procedural execution necessary to manage society, albeit one uniquely tied to power. However, I did not covet such leadership roles but instead sought to influence those in power through speech, argument, and the development of powerful ideas. While in recent years I have felt a kind of calling to leadership, I did not have a concrete or positive vision of what this pursuit would entail.
EF presented a characteristically different view of leadership. A leader has the power to ennoble his subordinates, elevating them to their unique potential instead of managing them as resources. This shone through the event's conceptual teachings and through its examples. Decentralize Command, for example, proscribes that the leader provide a why and direct his subordinates to find the how, forcing them to take charge and bringing each of them into the kind of "leadership in himself" necessary to take ownership over his part of the mission. Moreover, in providing a meaningful why, the subordinate's role is bestowed with meaning, not mere utility. Dinnell's relationship with Willink and Babin exemplified the ennobling power of leadership. As SEALs, Willink had instilled belief in Dinnell and made him feel sincerely meaningful, helping him reach his full potential. After the military, Dinnell struggled financially, trapped in menial work. Willink and Babin's formation of EF provided Dinnell with the opportunity to convert his unique SEAL and personal experiences into the meaningful work of helping others as a leadership instructor. While business leaders today are often heralded as "job creators," alluding to their economic impact, here the business leader provides the opportunity for his subordinates to convert their skills not only into dollars but into human excellence.
Perhaps what most convinced me of the nobility of leadership was the spirit of the event in which its teaching was presented. Within the event’s many exhortations towards virtue and their accompanying exhibitions of the higher aims of human life, one in particular stood out to me. It was a video from the Jocko Podcast in which Willink addressed hypothetical critics who liken his seemingly endless fitness routines to the punishment of Sisyphus, a character from Greek mythology who was condemned to roll a large rock up a mountain for eternity, with the rock rolling back down each time it reached the top. Willink, with his singular passion and intensity, affirmed an inversion of the Sisyphean characterization: "Getting that rock to the top of the mountain - that's not what my goal is. My goal actually is pushing the rock. Because pushing the rock, that pushes me, that makes me tougher, that makes me harder, mentally and physically.... I want to struggle... and I want to push, and I don't want it to end. If I ever got the rock to the top of the mountain and it stayed there, I'd push it back down myself." Here, man is heralded as a fundamentally noble being, one whose hardness and excellence lies within him, the chiseling out of which is his fundamental task. Man is not a beast of burden, a slave to utility, whether to transporting a rock to a mountaintop, to making money, or to acquiring honors. I felt that by mastering the art of leadership I would become the man who rolls the rock back down the mountain for all eternity.
Turning to more directly practical matters, EF opened my eyes to new possibilities in the context of individual leadership concepts and ideas. Some ideas, like leading up the chain of command, where a subordinate can exercise influence over his boss, I would not have previously thought possible. While other ideas, like readback, where a leader asks his subordinates to repeat his plan back to him rather than just asking if anyone has any questions, seem simple and obvious but are easily overlooked. For other ideas, like the archetype of the silent leader, I would have previously misunderstood its intent and the conditions of its possibility. I would have thought that the leader's silence, for example, was a deliberate attempt to project a cool exterior that commands obedience through fear, rather than, as EF taught, the natural result of having properly implemented two fundamental leadership principles: building trust with your team and implementing Decentralize Command (imparting in your team a clear why such that they can figure out the how with minimal verbal direction).
As most of the event's teaching was new to me, my first step in attempting to apply it has been to experiment with small changes and to look at situations in my life differently, through the lens of leadership. Now, for example, when I receive an impossible technical request from a business client, I try to lead him to discover its impossibility by asking him questions about the request, rather than directly explaining its impossibility as I used to. Now, after a typical meeting I find myself asking if there was a leadership opportunity that I missed, such as the opportunity to build trust or leadership capital. Politically, I recently came across a patriotic though underwhelming and misguided article. While I would typically dismiss the article or the author, the simple question "are you helping your team?" came to my mind as did the chastisement "when you begin to care more about your team than yourself, then you begin to be a leader." Although I am not connected with the author, I could be, and the skill of leadership has opened my eyes to the possibility of a productive collaboration. (None of this should be interpreted as a dogmatic acceptance of EF's teaching, but rather as a sincere attempt to understand it, to see how it fits practically into my life, and to apply and evaluate it.)
The conference also helped me implement some other positive changes in my life. Thanks to the encouragement and inspiration of Rob Jones, I've worked up to running a 5K two times per week (a distance that I had previously not been able to run). I started a reading and writing group in Nashville, which is something that I had intended to do when I first moved here but didn't. I improved my progress in Jiu-Jitsu by recognizing a weakness in my training habits, of too aggressively attempting to survive by holding a defensive position (which was a habit that had I developed when I first started training) rather than trying to escape and experiment with new counter attacks.
Finally, the conference helped me improve my skill as a writer, which is one of my most important personal goals. It provided a wealth of excellent material as well as the inspiration for writing this article. Additionally, through one the conference's exercises, I was forced to confront a significant weakness in my writing process, which I critically assessed under the rubric of employing tactical rather than strategic thinking (of mistakenly believing that a series of small-scale victories will lead to overall victory). In my writing process, this often takes the form of a kind of perfectionism where I precisely hone every sentence or paragraph (tactical victory) at the expense of constructing a good holistic document in a timely manner (strategic loss). Switching my approach while writing this article, I was able to flesh out an entire draft quickly which made it much easier to get feedback from others, ultimately making this piece much better and helping me develop a habit that I will employ in future writing projects.
The American Crisis
It was the cause of America that made me an author. It was this cause to which my life was inextricably bound at university and it was this cause that led me to the EF event. I had hoped that the event would help clarify and advance my specific role in this cause. To this end I wanted to better understanding three things. First, to better understand what makes Willink such a unique and powerful force in American life, to which two things stuck out to me: the manner in which fallen soldiers impact one's life and a richer understanding of the appropriate role of fortifying virtues (like courage and discipline) in life. Second, to understand the connection between leadership and Jiu-Jitsu, a connection that I thought have could been presented more strongly at the conference, as I will discuss later. Finally, to understand how I could have better led the fight for the heart and soul of America at university and how I can better lead the fight going forward. To this, the event forced me to identify specific ways in which I can help lead the ongoing effort and to reflect on the challenges that I anticipate facing and how EF's teachings may be helpful in overcoming them.
At the conference, the realities of war were highlighted to me more forcefully than they had ever been before, as was the impact of a fallen soldier on those closest to him, to whom he is not only remembered and memorialized but is also the living spirit that animates their good works. Stories of military death and casualty arose in nearly every speech, from the conference's opening salvo recounting Monsoor's tragic sacrifice to its conclusion which valorized the work of Debbie Lee (mother of fallen soldier Marc Lee) with America's Mighty Warriors as "carrying on Marc's spirit for all of us." Moreover, the fallen soldier is inexorably bound to the entire teaching of the conference (Willink and Babin brought home from war the good of leadership but also the eternal burden and pain of their fallen teammates) and animates EF's commitment to succeed in its mission, as Dinnell affirmed in his speech, echoing the forceful and succinct promise "we will not fail you" that Willink had made at the casket of Seth Stone. Several personal meetings at the conference were also impactful to me, such as meeting Rob Jones (who lost both of his legs in an IED explosion) and meeting Debbie Lee who was, to my recollection, the first Gold Star Family member (related to a fallen soldier) that I had ever met. Lee inscribed my copy of a book that she contributed to with the phrase "live your life worthy of their sacrifice." This was impactful to me as it was this sense of duty that had driven me since university. Yet for me, alienated from the realities of war, it was always a duty to a hypothetical fallen soldier. While I can never truly know how it feels to lose someone so close to you in war, the conference did make it feel more real.
The conference immersed attendees in a world of fortifying virtues (such as courage and discipline) and patriotism, rooted in reverence for military sacrifice. Yet it was here, immersed in the purest realization of these virtues, that a more nuanced understanding of their role came to light. These internal virtues are not alone sufficient to realize an external good, whether it be personal excellence, business success, or national fortitude. Instead, this good is realized only through the mastery of the practical art of leadership. Effective leadership requires these virtues yet also directs their use and mediates their expression through competing virtues such as humility. I believe that this realization can serve as an important point of reorientation for many people today. Responses to the current crisis that call for a restoration of fortifying virtues, which I see as a generally positive phenomenon, often view their cultivation as an end in itself. Yet behind Willink, who is perhaps the most well known and respected expositor of these virtues today, Babin, and the rest of the EF team, stands a complex art that they promote as necessary to realize these desired goods. (Perhaps an analogy to martial arts is relevant here: that while virtues like strength and courage are useful in a fight, effective self-defense requires mastery of a martial art.)
Turning to the question of how I could have better led the fight at university, I see precisely this as my crucial error: of believing that instilling fortifying virtues, such as social courage, in the populace would be enough to set the community on the right path. While I did attempt to organize people into collective action, I did not attempt to implement anything like the complex leadership framework taught at the conference. Has leadership not been properly thought in the battle for the heart and soul of America? Is leadership the untapped power that can revitalize the American spirit? While this is an intriguing idea and one that deserves to be taken seriously, I do sincerely believe that the fight at university was unwinnable. Nevertheless, this defeat has supplied the American cause with a crucial resource: a critical mass of intelligent, courageous, and ambitious patriots unbound to mainstream institutions, a group from which I believe much good can arise.
The EF event forced me to reflect on how I can help lead efforts among this group. Among this group, I see three central difficulties: a lack of clarity of mission, that people are working independently rather than forming concrete teams, and that people are scattered across the internet rather than working together physically. As I begin to address these problems, I foresee some complications, though I believe that the EF event has provided me with some tools to address them, as I detail below.
The most significant problem that I see is a lack of mission. People within this group are working on good things: running small businesses, starting tech companies, offering online courses on philosophy and political thought (especially from viewpoints that are censored today), writing intelligently on contemporary politics and religion, writing fiction and poetry, self-publishing books and independent studies, and organizing online networks of such skilled and dedicated people. However, this group is not oriented towards a common mission, nor have its members adequately clarified the usefulness of their projects, often leading them to lament that their works are not more widely appreciated. I believe that EF's principle of ownership is a useful point of reflection here: to take ownership of the fact that the work is not appreciated, by, for example, building relationships with those you want to appreciate it, and putting in the effort to show them why it is valuable. I have taken ownership in such a way by writing this article: part of its goal is to illustrate to a wider audience the power of political philosophy to help the American cause. (Conversely, I am also trying to illustrate the power of EF's teaching to those who might otherwise underappreciated it.) Dinnell's speech is also obviously relevant here, centering on the need to clearly identify your mission, to know who your enemy is, and to clarify what winning actually looks like. To do so, he advises reconnecting with your why, which I intend to do in the form of a detailed mission document that I will publish on this Substack.
Another problem is the failure to form explicit teams and to instead operate as a loosely connected "grassroots" movement. Teams have not formed partly due to the lack of an overarching mission and partly because people had to first stabilize themselves financially by pursuing their own projects. Since many have acquired this personal stability, the time is ripe for team building. However, for a typical person in this group (myself included), I do see a fundamental aversion to both joining and leading a team. In my view, such a person's aversion to joining a team is rooted in a strong sense of individualism, fearing that the team will stifle his creativity and force him to pledge allegiance to a cause that does not fully align with his nuanced perspective, while his aversion to leading a team is rooted in a negative view of leadership, seeing it as menial administrative work that takes time away from "real work" or as fundamentally destructive to his current relationships, by demanding he bark orders at friends, for example.
I believe EF's unique approach to leadership may help mitigate these concerns among this group. To the concern for individualism, EF's teachings on freedom, of leading such that subordinates are in control over their own destinies by clarifying the why not the how of a mission and letting them come up with their own plan, for example, are relevant. As is Willink's teaching on unified strategic goals which holds that it's okay if team members pursue different goals or agendas as long as the leader maintains alignment with the overall mission. To the negative view of leadership, I reiterate my view above, that EF portrays leadership as a fundamentally noble pursuit, one that orients both the leader and follower towards human excellence. Moreover, I believe that the complexity and degree of thought put into EF's leadership framework will appeal to such an intellectually oriented group. Finally, to the concern over the effect of leadership on personal relationships, EF's teachings on the importance of humility in a leader, of building relationships with and caring for teammates, of building leadership capital (by using a subordinate's plan, for example), and of taking ownership, which fundamentally mitigates the spread of blame, are all relevant.
While the problem of people connecting over the internet rather than in person is the final one that I discuss, it is actually the first one that must be addressed. It is only through in-person meetings that a clear overarching mission can develop and that explicit teams can form organically. To this end, hosting physical conferences and securing properties at which people can regularly gather are crucial. Shortly after attending the EF event, I attended another event that I believe is an important step in this direction. It was the North by Northwest (NxNW) event organized through Justin Murphy's OtherLife group (an online group of talented creatives, writers, independent scholars, and entrepreneurs that I've been a part of for several years) at the Wagon Box Inn in Story, Wyoming. The Inn was purchased by another group with the vision of becoming "something between a college campus, a cherished vacation home in the mountains, and the tea houses and taverns that were once the seedbeds of philosophical and political discourse."
The NxNW event highlighted to me the crucial importance of in-person meetings. Not only did I meet many interesting people to collaborate with, but the power of community, camaraderie, and a sense of brotherhood, none of which can be built online, became apparent to me. The power of camaraderie and brotherhood for team success, while not discussed explicitly at the EF event in the context of business, was prevalent in EF's descriptions of their time as SEALs. I believe that EF's comprehensive leadership framework will serve as an excellent guide to begin leading tight-knit in-person groups like this.
Political Philosophy
I felt that understanding the American crisis at a deeper level was necessary to set America on a stable footing. This led me to undertake an independent study of political philosophy which revealed the necessity of a comprehensive understanding of man, something that is severely lacking in the modern world. I believed that attending the EF event would provide unique insights into the nature of man as well as into the possibility of a revival of ancient ideals in the modern world. Prior to the event, I had noticed some of EF's philosophically relevant connections relating to the holistic education of man, to the Greek teaching on virtue, to specific elements of Socrates' teaching, and to the power of war to fundamentally transform the nature of man. This section explores these connections further given what I learned at the conference.
How are EF and the Greeks related in their teachings on virtue? Prior to the event, I had noticed a similarity, centering around a shared reverence for fortifying virtues, like courage, between the two. After acquiring a richer understanding of EF's teaching at the event, I believe that this connection is even stronger than I had initially thought. For the Greeks, while fortifying virtues like courage are upheld, so too are mediating virtues like prudence and moderation. While teachings among the Greeks differ (on the rank of the virtues and how they are balanced, for example), the cultivation of virtues always serves a telos, an end or a purpose. This telos is always related to the development of human excellence and to living a good and noble life (in contrast to the pursuit of other aims like freedom or pleasure).
Above, I characterized my understanding of EF's teaching on the virtues as follows: "Effective leadership requires [fortifying] virtues yet also directs their use and mediates their expression through competing virtues such as humility." As with the Greeks, for EF both fortifying and mediating virtues are upheld and the cultivation of these virtues serves a telos. Here, this telos is effective leadership, and leadership itself has a telos, which is either victory in war, business prosperity, or living a good life. While the parallelism does not strictly hold, it does strongly differentiate these two views from those that dominate today. These include the views that fortifying virtues should be opposed (modern weakness and decadence), that virtue should be cultivated in the service of freedom or pleasure rather than excellence, and that the cultivation of fortifying virtues like courage is an end in itself (not serving any higher purpose).
At the conference I noticed an interesting connection to Socratic questioning. Within Plato's works, we never find Socrates alone, but rather in complex dialogues with other men in which he shows extreme care and tact. He rarely presents a direct teaching but instead leads them to the truth through questioning. By questioning their firmly held opinions (such as on what courage or justice is), he leads them to recognize the weakness of their beliefs, a necessary step on the way towards the truth, and one that often evades their defensiveness. In a similar spirit, EF's teaching on the indirect approach to leadership advises, for example, that a leader should not directly point out a flaw in a subordinate's plan but should instead ask him questions that lead him to recognize this truth on his own. Several other connections to specific themes in Greek philosophy could be drawn, such as on the importance of friendship, on prudence and judgement being essential to good rule, and on the tension between theory and practice, but I will not pursue these here.
Instead, I will highlight a more fundamentally relevant connection. Within Plato's dialogues, Socrates' teaching is interwoven with the dramatic action between him and his interlocutors, while at the conference, EF's teaching on leadership was tightly interwoven with dramatic military stories. A fundamental question in political philosophy centers around the proper mode of access to political truths: can these truths be captured logically, through a complex system of concepts, or is there something essential about political life that defies conceptualization, that can only be grasped through story presenting dramatic action among people, for example? This question was adjudicated in an important way surrounding the reading of Plato's dialogues. While many readers, operating under the former view, attempted to "extract" Plato's conceptual teaching and leave the "useless" drama of the dialogue behind, Leo Strauss (1899-1973), operating under the opposite view, uncovered Plato's rich teachings on political life, which were implicit in the dialogues' subtle dramatic detail.
This fundamental question arises in the context of the EF event as well. Some may be inclined to believe that the conference's essential teaching on leadership lies entirely in its explicit conceptual teaching which can consequently be isolated from its prominent dramatic content (military stories, reverence for fallen soldiers, exhortations to self-mastery, physical fitness, martial arts). That is, that this content has no bearing on the event's essential teaching, even if it serves other ends such as engaging the audience or supplementing the teaching with examples. Taking a clue from Strauss, I am inclined to disagree with this view and instead hold that this dramatic content is essential to truly comprehend EF's teaching on leadership. In fact, as I said above, I believe that this content implicitly carries one of the most important teachings of the event: that leadership is a fundamentally noble pursuit. It was this teaching that instilled in me the desire to actually become a leader. I don't believe that this teaching could have been captured in direct speech but only through the event's dramatic content through which it shone.
Turning to the question of whether and how war affects a philosophically relevant transformation of man, two ideas at the conference stood out to me. First, that the fallen soldier not only impacts the lives of those nearest to him, but fundamentally transforms the nature of their existence. The soldier is, in a sense, always with them, as a burden and pain that never goes away, as well as a spirit that lives within and acts through them, animating their good works, for example. Man, in death, is revealed as a being that can be simultaneously there and not there, a conspicuous absence whose force is always felt. Second, veteran survivors of war can know both the depths and heights of human existence to a greater degree than modern man can. Rob Jones' story clearly illustrated this point, showing that his losing his legs in war did not break him but instead made him stronger. A clip from the Jocko Podcast woven between two of the event's speeches articulated this point more explicitly. In the clip, Willink addressed veterans struggling with despair over the evils that they had experienced during war and their subsequent feelings of alienation from non-veterans who do not truly comprehend these evils. Willink affirmed that the others do not truly understand this darkness, yet also sought to turn these veterans around from their despair and towards the realization that they also understand the heights of joy, love, brotherhood, and the goodness and beauty of life much more intimately than the others do.
Yet the darkness of war alone does not guarantee access to these heights. Explicit effort is required to do so, as Jones' exhortation to own your attitude and Willink's exhortation that the struggling veteran discipline himself in order to free himself indicate. It seems that war may provide a glimpse of these heights as well as the impetus for a dedicated questioning into the good life, but that a sincere pursuit of this life requires the art of leadership in oneself (which the above two directives serve). To my motivating question about the fundamental impacts of alienation from war on modern man, we may wonder if losing the ability to properly raise the question of the good life is one of them. But can we learn about insights from war without going to war ourselves? Can stories of war help modern man raise the question of the good life and orient him towards its pursuit? To this question, I think that the manner in which these stories are communicated is crucial. As I said above, the impact of war was communicated to me more strongly through the EF event than had previously been done through other means, such as movies, books, museums, ceremonies, news reports, and occasional discussions with veterans. Is there a fundamental reason for this? I think it's worth investigating three possibilities: that the event immersed attendees in such stories for two days, that the stories were specifically chosen to impart a lesson (such as owning your attitude), and that attendees were not merely passive listeners but were instead actively involved in learning a practical skill (leadership).
While many other philosophically relevant insights could be drawn out from the conference, I will stop here. A key point of this section has been to show that many fundamental questions about the good life were raised more seriously at the EF event than they are elsewhere in modern society, even if they are so raised at a sub-philosophical level. It may be wondered how these insights, even if brought under a philosophic framing as I have begun to do here, can help us navigate the current crisis. While this is the ultimate goal, it cannot be our immediate goal. We are still in the preliminary stages of even attempting such a corrective. Our task now must be to discover where in American culture such insights live most fully and to gather together these fragments that will ultimately be sewn together into a comprehensive view of human life and the good political order. It is from such a clear and comprehensive view that concrete political action may flow.
In my view, it is the essential task of intelligent patriots unbound to mainstream institutions (the group that I hope to help lead, as I stated above) to rigorously develop such a comprehensive philosophy of the good life contra the modern world. It is with this group that I see the quest for the good life and political truth pursued most passionately, and it is with this group that I see the unique capability to unify the fundamental insights from foundational texts, both ancient and modern, with the few elements of contemporary culture, such as the EF event, in which the good life is earnestly pursued. Moreover, it is within these cultural elements that I see the proper soil for such philosophical seeds to ultimately grow. One of the goals of this article has been to encourage the investigation of other cultural elements that may hold an essential piece of the puzzle and to show how such an investigation might proceed.
Suggested Additions
I would suggest two additions to the conference. First, to have a concluding speech that reviews and ties together the information taught throughout the event, and second, to clarify the connection between leadership and Jiu-Jitsu.
While each speech was clear and well organized, I felt that it was difficult to keep track of all of the information presented throughout the conference. I think that this can be remedied with a concluding speech that provides a short overview of each of the event's speeches and also reviews key concepts and terms and how they were used throughout the event. This conceptual review would be useful as the conference introduced many new concepts, such as leading from the rear, leadership capital, readback, and leading up the chain of command, and also used common terms like ego in a special way. In other words, such a review could address questions like "What is leading up the chain of command and what successful examples of this technique were presented over the past two days?" and "How exactly does the ego negatively impact leadership?" (to which an answer could be: by preventing honest self-assessment, inhibiting decision making through rejection of feedback, inhibiting relationship building, and inhibiting the ability to detach from a situation.) I also think that it would be useful to show the interconnection of these concepts in some way. While this may be difficult to do in a speech, perhaps supplementing the material with a wiki-style network of web pages would be useful. This could serve as a glossary of concepts that also reveals the connections among them through each page's hyperlinks.
While Jiu-Jitsu was an interesting inclusion in the event, its connection with leadership was only briefly addressed. Willink touched upon this connection by citing Jiu-Jitsu as a primary inspiration for many of his ideas on the counterintuitive nature of leadership. For example, Jiu-Jitsu requires an indirect approach to maneuvering and launching attacks while effective leadership requires an indirect approach to critical communication, such as by asking a subordinate critical questions rather than directly refuting his idea. When I asked Echo Charles about the connection of leadership and Jiu-Jitsu event's kickoff social, he also cited the indirect approach, as well as the balance of competition and collaboration, and the importance of coming face to face with the truth. This final idea is captured succinctly by the expression "the mats don't lie," that while you can live your life day to day without being measured, hence evading the truth, a Jiu-Jitsu match on the mats forces you to come face to face with the truth.
I think a short speech dedicated to the connection of leadership and Jiu-Jitsu would have been useful. I also think that the notion of martial arts training fits in nicely with the notion of training discussed in the speeches as well as with the role-playing exercises that were conducted throughout the conference, such as where one person played the role of a boss and the other as a high achieving employee who refused to obey safety protocols. I would be interested to know if martial arts training can be used as a model for designing training programs relevant to leadership. Or do the two arts, martial arts and leadership, fundamentally differ in the manner in which their training can be carried out? In Jiu-Jitsu training, you regularly simulate the neutralization or injury of another person (choking him out or breaking a limb), yet are able to do so without actual injury by tapping out (which signals the onset of injury and commands the training partner to stop his attack). In a leadership training exercise, you may want to simulate the destruction of someone's ego. Would it be possible to do this in a manner that does not cause permanent damage (which may be something like the destruction of a personal relationship) and that either training partner can easily halt before such damage occurs (akin to tapping out)?
It may seem counterintuitive, but I suspect that it may not be so easy to develop a training regiment where things like the ego or personal reputation are at stake. This was something that struck me at university: that in MMA or Jiu-Jitsu fights people can nearly kill each other then leave the arena as friends, while in many political discussions today, a slight personal offense or disagreement can turn someone into a lifelong enemy and social pariah. It was the desire to remedy this behavior, perceiving it as a great problem for the nation, that spawned my interest in developing a training program for such debate modeled on martial arts training, as I cited above as a motivation for attending the event. While I have yet to explore this idea in detail, I think EF's linking of martial arts and leadership training echoes a similar realization (albeit in a different realm) and encourages my pursuit.
Conclusion
I highly recommend attending this event. The event illustrated the true power of leadership and inspired in me the sincere desire to become a leader. It provided a wealth of practical knowledge about leadership that would be useful to teams operating in any industry, as I hope the Conference Description section demonstrated. While the event largely aims to help people overcome business and personal challenges, I believe that it is also an important American cultural phenomenon, as the Motivations and Reflections sections sought to demonstrate. The event promotes many things that are good for the nation: leadership, business success, virtue and self-mastery, patriotism rooted in reverence for military sacrifice, and martial arts. Moreover, it unifies these seemingly disparate goods, pointing towards a comprehensive view of human life and a means by which such a life can be cultivated (through leadership). At a deeper level, the event provides insight into the philosophical underpinnings of the current cultural crisis. It provides insight into the essence of man, the nature of death and war, the possibility of a revival of ancient philosophical ideals, and raises fundamental questions about the good life more seriously than they are raised elsewhere in modern society.
The event helped me reflect on my role in the battle for the heart and soul of America, on how I could have better led the fight at university and more importantly how I can better lead the fight going forward. To this end, I considered my role among a loosely connected group of independent scholars, writers, and entrepreneurs, a group that I believe has a crucial role to play in revitalizing the American spirit. Is leadership the untapped power that can help this group reach its full potential? I reflected upon key challenges that I see within this group and how EF's unique leadership teaching might help overcome them. I highlighted the key challenge of building bridges between this group and other groups of patriotic Americans. This article aimed to facilitate such a connection by demonstrating the intelligence and depth of EF's teaching, and conversely by demonstrating the relevance and power of political philosophy to address the current cultural crisis.