https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mnc9l3y6VcI
Going back to my career in the military, I think this is where I initially learned this, because as you’re coming up in the military, you know, you’re going up in the ranks and you’re getting moved into more positions of responsibility and you’re going out and conducting operations, and all those things that you do inside the military in your career. And what I found more than anything else was where I got gratification and what felt like I actually did something good was when I’d see a guy that I had worked with, that I had mentored, that I had trained, when I’d see them step up and excel. Be able to achieve things, be able to accomplish things. That was more gratifying than me doing it myself. And so I think that I started to notice that, that that’s what really… When did you notice that? How old were you? Probably 29, 30, something along those. So I was in a leadership position. I started to have people working, that were my direct reports. But I realized, oh, I can really help this person. They don’t know what to do, right? And inside the military, inside the SEAL teams, it’s like, there’s a mission that you’re gonna do and there’s a certain way to conduct that mission. And this person that had only been doing this job for three years might not know that. And I knew it. There’s not too many things that you know really well. Where you go, oh, I can show you how to do this. And instead of just saying, hey, I’m better than you, I’m smarter than you, I can show you how to do this, you can follow my lead. And instead of having that attitude, it’s an attitude of like, hey, you’re gonna be just as capable as I am. At some point, I can help you along the way. More even. Yeah, that’s the goal is to make them more capable. And this is something that comes from Jiu Jitsu as well. In Jiu Jitsu, if you and I train Jiu Jitsu and we’ve both been training the same amount of time, sure, it’ll come down to who’s bigger and stronger, but I realized, hey, there’s always someone that’s been training longer than me and they’re gonna be able to beat me. That doesn’t make them a better human being than me. It just means that they’ve been training longer for me. And that applies to just about everything. So the skill of being a seal and planning a mission, oh, I might be better than you right now, but over time, I should be able to train you and you should be able to, like you said, get better than I am. And so I felt that that left the biggest mark on my soul of being able to help people out. And then when I got out of the military and I started kind of teaching the same leadership principles that I had learned, and then I started getting that same feedback and then with writing kids’ books, like that was a whole new level. When you have a kid that comes up and says, hey, I did my first pull-up or I got an A on my math test or I learned all my times tables and the parents have tears in their eyes and saying thank you, there’s nothing better than that. So I think that’s actually true. I do think there’s nothing better than that. And so I’ve been trying to take that apart because that’s a relatively radical claim. So you can imagine the attractions of hedonism. And so everybody has their base desires, and I would say base for a variety of reasons. They’re lust, anger, those are good examples. They want what they want right bloody well now. And there’s some gratification to be had in obtaining that. Now the problem with right now is it’s sort of to hell with other people and to hell with the future. And so maybe that’s not an optimized path. This is why hedonism per se is a dysfunctional orientation. It reduces everything to the moment and then it reduces everything to the whim inside the individual. So there’s no future, there’s no time and there’s no other people. Okay, power, there’s another example. It’s like, well, I could go for power. I can compel and force other people to do what I want for my gratification obviously, regardless of what they want. Why shouldn’t I do that if I couldn’t do it? You know, and cultures like ancient Rome, cultures that are predicated on the notion that might makes right, they’re predicated on the idea that well, if you can do it, you should. And that the fact that you can and would makes you better like by definition. If I can force someone to do what I want them to do and they can’t resist, then why shouldn’t I just be contemptuous of them? And I think the answer to that is, well, backfires. It’s like you can enforce your will on people for a while, but even among chimpanzees, the probability that the moment you turn your back or show any weakness that you’re gonna get torn into pieces is extremely high. So hedonism, power, those are sort of alternative motivational states. Well, this one, this pleasure in helping other people develop, I think, well, why shouldn’t we think that that’s just your cover story? And I think the reason for that is, well, here’s one reason. Human beings are pair bonding creatures and our children are dependent longer than the offspring of any organisms. So there’s two pathways to reproduction. There’s two patterns of natural world reproduction. There’s the mosquito pathway. These have technical names. Can’t remember, one is K. I can’t remember the technical names. Mosquitoes on the one end, human beings on the other. So the mosquito strategy is a million offspring and if 999,000 of them die, as long as one survives or two, you’ve done your job. No investment past sex, right? And there are human beings who have that strategy as well. No investment past sex, right? The alternative is immense investment, maybe multi-generational investment. That’s parenting, grandparenting, great-grandparenting, maybe the establishment of a pattern that even works beyond that. Human beings have staked their existence on the high investment reproductive strategy. And so to the degree that we’re biologically prepared to be fathers, there’s an instinct for mentoring. And I think that what you’re describing is the broader scale manifestation of exactly that. Now you tied these things together. You said you discovered when you were young that helping other people develop was a great intrinsic pleasure. And you said maybe the most rewarding of the intrinsic pleasures. And I really do believe that’s true. It’s quite stunning to realize that. My graduate supervisor was a very great guy. He’s still alive, Robert Peel. And Bob was a really good professor and he got a lot of joy from lecturing. He was a really good researcher, a good administrator. Like Bob had it all going. And still the thing he felt that he took most pleasure in across the entire expanse of his career was helping his graduate students in particular develop their careers. He was very generous at that. And of course it paid back to him immensely because it turns out if you share ideas, you generate more ideas because the ideas get rewarded. And if you help other people develop their career, they tend to, it reflects very positively on you. There’s a saying in the SEAL teams, if you take care of your gear, your gear will take care of you. Meaning if you take care of your parachute and you prepare it and you pack it correctly, when you pull your rip cord, it will open. Or your dive gear, when you’re underwater, if you prepared it and you’ve maintained it correctly, you can breathe underwater, which are really good. And you don’t die. Well, the twist that I put on that was if you take care of your people, your people will take care of you. And that’s absolutely true, even in what you’re just talking about with Bob. Because Bob invested in you, he took care of you. And look, could we again, could we play the Jordan game on this thing where maybe he was just doing that, knowing that in the long run, all those favors were gonna come back and he was gonna get taken care of. That’d be a really long-term strategy. It’d be a kind of a gut check to put up with all these miserable graduate students this whole time, where you’re just kind of putting chips on the table, hoping that these investments would pay off. I also think too that at some point, you have to flip the definition. If your strategy is short-term gratification, that’s one thing. But if your strategy is long-term mutual reinforcement and development, even if you can see that that’s a benefit to you, if you’re the sort of person that was only doing that because it was a benefit to you, you’d revert to the short-term immediately. And so at some point, if it’s a long enough term investment strategy, there’s no being cynical about it anymore because the details of the strategy obviate the necessity for the cynicism. So I’ve been writing about the gospels.