Own It

Back when I was in college, starting my first company, I read every business book I could get my hands on.  For a several-year spree, I made my way through all of the business classics.  And then for several years after that, I still kept up with new bestsellers.

But, over time, I found myself reading fewer and fewer business books.  In part, because most didn’t really have anything new to say.  And, in part, because most were terribly, terribly written – a chapter’s worth of ideas stretched to hundreds of pages through needless repetition and bland anecdote filler.

Sure, I discovered a handful of great volumes in the past decade – like Scaling Up and The Lean Startup– that I re-read, refer back to, and recommend. But, mostly, I was out of the business book game.

That’s why, though it was recommended by several different mutual friends, I was initially reluctant to read Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership.  The book extends the lessons Jocko and his co-author Leif Babson learned as Navy SEALs (both as commanders in Iraq, and then leading the SEAL’s officer training program back stateside) to the business and not-for-profit world, where they’d been consulting for several years.  As much as I steer clear of most business books, I tend to skip pretty much all military history books.  So, despite thinking very highly of Jocko, his book seemed like a total miss for me.

But since it was published and climbed the bestseller lists, I kept hearing about it – whether from articles and podcasts, or colleagues and friends.  So earlier this month, I decided to finally give it a read.

And, in short, I’ve very glad I did.  It’s the first business book in a couple of years that I would actually recommend.

Further, though it’s pitched to a corporate audience, Extreme Ownership is actually about leadership in the broadest sense.  Anyone who works with other people, on pretty much anything, would probably benefit from the book’s insights.

Each chapter follows a simple, standard structure: a story from the authors’ time as SEALs (whether coaching young officers through a training boat race in San Diego, or rescuing hostages in Ramadi), a broader principle drawn from the story, and then an example of how that principle applied in their civilian consulting work.

The chapters are concise, engaging, and fluff-free.  And all of them gave me food for thought.  Fundamentally, they each boil down to the titular idea of extreme ownership – taking responsibility for everything that happens around you, even if it seems like it’s out of your direct control.  If your subordinates are dropping the ball, perhaps it’s because you’re not sufficiently helping them get things done; if your boss is constantly demanding updates and micro-managing, perhaps you’re not providing proactive enough upstream communication; and if you’re caught flat-footed by an unforeseen move by a competitor or in the market, maybe you didn’t deeply enough consider and prepare contingency plans.

Blaming everyone around you is a common default – in the business world, and the world as a whole.  Jocko and Leif make a strong case for taking the opposite approach – pointing the finger at yourself first, then building positive strategies and responses based firmly in the belief that the buck, at all times, stops with you.

As compared to Scaling Up or Lean Startup, the book falls short in providing a specific, actionable business road map.  But it’s also much broader in focus than either of those two.  While they’re only useful if you’re starting and quickly growing a company, <i>Extreme Ownership</i> is applicable to basically everyone.

In summary: Extreme Ownership – two thumbs up, and definitely worth the read.

Quotidien

This Thursday and Friday, Jews around the world gathered to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.  And though there are a slew of customs and commandments associated with the holiday, there’s one that stands above all the rest: the commandment to hear the blowing of the shofar, the simple bugle made from a hollowed-out ram’s horn.  The shofar’s blast is a bracing sound, a sort of primal cry, and it’s meant to ‘wake up’ the soul, in preparation for Yom Kippur, the day of judgment, ten days later.

If you can play the trumpet, you can play the shofar.  So, as in a handful of prior years past, I was asked to be the Ba’al Tekiah, the shofar blower, at this year’s Rosh Hashanah services.

But I was also asked to come in every morning for the month preceding Rosh Hashanah, the Hebrew month of Elul, to play the shofar then, too.  While hearing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah itself is a commandment, doing so for the month leading up is simply a custom – albeit one that’s stood for thousands of years.  Essentially, it’s meant to be a sort of warm-up lap for the main new year’s day event, a way to pre-awaken the soul.

I agreed to help out.  So, for the past month, early every morning, I found myself standing in the synagogue sanctuary, shofar in hand.  It was, without a doubt, the longest stretch of morning prayer attendance I had ever clocked (or considered) in my life.

By the end of the month, I thought I’d be happy to drop that responsibility from my already full morning routine.  But I found myself yesterday evening, as I played the final shofar blasts that brought the Rosh Hashanah service to a close, thinking it now seemed slightly strange that I didn’t need to attend this coming week.

After the service, helping to clean up, I ended up thumbing through a book of Jewish writings, and came across a story I knew well about Rabbi Akiva:

Despite eventually becoming one of the super-stars of the Talmud, by age 40, Akiva was still illiterate.  Then, one day, as he stood near the mouth of a well, he noticed a hollowed out stone that was used to hold drawn water.  How had it been hollowed out, he wondered aloud.  From water falling on the stone, day after day, he was told.  Which led Akiva to famously reason, “if water can wear away a hard stone, then surely the words of the Torah can carve a way into my heart.”  That set him on his late-life learning path, on the way to eventual greatness.

But what I hadn’t seen before was a response to that story, from Rabbi Israel Salanter in the 18th century: “The waters carved the stone only because it fell drop after drop, year after year, without pause. Had the accumulated water all poured down at once in a powerful stream, it would have slipped off the rock without leaving a trace.”

As I’ve written about before, I’m increasingly convinced that anything worth doing is worth doing every day.  So, with my shofar experience fresh in mind, I’ve been thinking about how I might intregrate some kind of daily Jewish practice into my morning routine (even if it’s one that doesn’t involve schlepping to the synagogue every day).

More broadly, between now and Yom Kippur, I’ve resolved to think about my daily practices and habits in general.  About the kind of person I want to be, about what I want to have accomplished, by next Rosh Hashanah.  And, working backwards from those questions, about the small things I need to do, every single day throughout the whole year, to make it happen.

So: shana tova u’metukah – a good and sweet year to you all.  May you grow through it, day by day.

Process, Results

A few days ago, I ran into a friend at the gym. He’s an executive in his mid-50’s, a guy in good shape who takes fitness seriously. When I saw him, he had 315 pounds racked for a back squat. But, he told me, his knees had recently been acting up on heavy squat days. Could I watch the next set, he asked.

I did. And sure enough, my friend’s form was atrocious. Valgus knees and ankles, forward weight shift over his toes, depth about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to parallel.

“That was a disaster,” I told him.

“Oh, I know,” he replied. “But if I squat with good form, I can’t lift nearly as much weight.”

He was willing to humor me for the sake of his knees, however, so we went back to the basics. Beginning with a 45 pound dumbbell goblet squat, drilling until it looked perfect. Then we went back to an empty barbell, until that looked perfect, too. And then we added weight, ten pounds at a time.

At 135 pounds, his squat looked great.
At 145, it was back to disaster.

“If you want to fix your knee issue,” I told him, “then squat with 135 pounds next time, and only add weight in subsequent sessions, no more than ten pounds from one session to the next, if your squat form still looks this pretty.”

At which point he balked.
“I can’t do that!” he exclaimed. “The guys here will think I can only squat 135 pounds.”
“And they’d be correct,” I told him. “That’s how much you can squat right.”

Still, I understood my friend’s concern. Six months ago, I tweaked my shoulder while bench pressing. For two weeks after, it hurt every time I lifted my arm above my head. And just when I thought it was getting better, concluded I could just power through, I benched again and tweaked it a second time.

So, taking my own medicine, I went back to ground zero. I worked face-pulls, bottom-up kettlebell presses, scapular drills, perfect bench press reps with just the empty bar. And then I slowly built back up, in ten-pound jumps, one workout to the next.

At the end of those six months, I’m now back to using more weight than I was before, and my shoulder feels great. But for the first few months, I dreaded seeing anyone I knew at the gym when I was building back up. Members and trainers I was friendly with would walk past, and I had a nearly irrepressible urge to explain, disclaim.

“Rehab,” I would tell them, gesturing sheepishly at my nearly empty bar.

It’s a hard impulse to fight, and one I see people struggle with all the time. Most people training in any gym are, first and foremost, trying to look cool while they’re training. But there’s a difference between developing a skill, and demonstrating it. Almost by definition, when you’re learning something new, or building strength or endurance, you make progress only when you’re right at your limit, out of your depth, looking terrible and incompetent, but challenging yourself enough to grow.

Which leads to a fundamental choice: you can either impress your buddies in< the gym with your performance, or you can impress the rest of the world later with your results. Put differently, you can look good while you’re working out, or you can look good from your working out.

So choose. Because, in my experience, you can’t really have both.

Epicure

Though I read Aristotle, Plato, and Seneca – in school and after – I’d previously never made it to Epicurus, a philosopher I therefore knew only through the eponym ‘epicurean’: from the OED, “devoted to the pursuit of pleasure; hence, luxurious, sensual, gluttonous.”

This past week, however, I actually dove into Epicurus’ direct teachings. And, on at least one level, his legacy in our vernacular is well-deserved. Consider:
“I don’t know how I shall conceive of the good, if I take away the pleasures of taste, if I take away sexual pleasure, if I take away the pleasure of hearing, and if I take away the sweet emotions that are caused by the sight of beautiful forms.”

Or:

“The beginning and root of every good is the pleasure of the stomach. Even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.”

But on further reading, it becomes clear that our current usage of ‘epicurean’ miss Epicurus’ intended mark, at least in some rather important respects.

While Epicurus extolled pleasures, he was first and foremost interested in simple ones. “Send me a pot of cheese,” he once wrote to a friend, “so that I might spread it on bread, and have a feast any time.” Indeed, most of what Epicurus ate were vegetables grown in his backyard garden. Sure, he was happy to eat richer meals, too. But he doubted whether those foods – or the finer thing more broadly – actually made for a better life. As he explained, “one must regard wealth beyond what is natural as of no more use than water to a container that is already overflowing.”
Epicurus didn’t believe that having more was bad, but rather that it wasn’t sufficient or necessary for happiness. As he succinctly put it, “nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied by little.”

So what did Epicurus think was necessary for happiness? His list is rather short:
1. Basic shelter, clothing, and food.
2. Good friends with whom to enjoy it.
3. The freedom and flexibility to spend our days as we choose.
4. And some time each day reflecting and self-analyzing.

Less flashy, perhaps, than the eponym he’s come to define. But, so far as I can tell, not at all a bad recipe for a good life.