"A Truly Educated Man Never Ceases to Learn"
So who is Jocko Willink and Leif Babin anyways? Why should I listen to what they have to say? Let’s just say these two guys are about as bada** as it gets. They lead one of most decorated Special Operations Unit from the war in Iraq! They lead the SEAL Task Unit Bruiser through some of the toughest urban combat ever in the history of SEALS teams. The number one reason they say they were successful is because of the leadership skills they had gained.
Through their leadership skills they were able to take back and secure a city called Ramadi, that was deemed “all but lost.” Once they finished their service in the special forces they started up a company called Echelon Front that teaches others those same leadership skills, but applies those principles to business ownership!
Here at MindzUnleashed I only want to put out the BEST books! There are so many books out there that aren’t the greatest……in fact in can be a complete waste of time to read some of them. However, “Extreme Ownership” is a must read for any business owner who’s business or life lacks leadership! Jocko and Leif really call people out in this book.
This book is important because it will really help you see the reason why your business is failing and why that reason is YOU! These principles also just don’t apply to business owners, they can apply to people who fail at their goals of being more healthy, or getting their finances in order.
This book is chalk-full of great principles all around! The book is divided into 3 parts!
As you can see there are tons of great things to learn from these men! I also really love how the book is set up. If you are like me and like to just find the golden nuggets it is super easy to as you can just skip to the “Principle” and “Application to Business” sections at the end of each chapter and read a quick recap of all the important things they covered!
Extreme Ownership is when you as a leader don’t blame anyone else for a failure except yourself. In the book Jocko and Leif give an example of this. They go on to say that if they were in fire fight and they got attacked from somewhere they weren’t expecting, they would tell themselves that was their fault for not thinking that the enemy could attack them from that direction.
Or if someone on their team accidentally messed up and didn’t do what they were supposed to do during an operation, they would blame themselves saying they should have trained the member better on their job.
If literally anything went wrong on the battlefield they took the blame for it and learned from that mistake. They never blamed anyone else, they took full responsibility and then made a plan so it wouldn’t happen in the future. So how does this apply to business or life?
Say you are the CEO of a company and your sales department is struggling to get sales. It could be very easy to blame your sales manager and tell them to do a better job and do more training. If you apply the principle of extreme ownership you are going to take the responsibility for the company not getting sales.
You would say things such as “maybe I need to help the sales manager understand what my expectations are,” “maybe its because I didn’t train them thoroughly on how to complete the task.” For whatever reason they aren’t performing it is YOUR fault! Once you accept this, it empowers you to make a plan and execute it to fix the problem!
If you have read any of my other blog posts, you might have seen me mention some of my experience out selling pest control for a company called “EDGE” with a head quarters in Utah. This company has great values and great people running it!
When I first joined on I was so excited! My mentor Devin was breaking records inside of the company and I was very very fortunate to be working so closely with him. Before I get into how I have seen these principles in action I want to first talk a little bit about the ownership opportunity people have with EDGE so this makes a little more sense.
EDGE is a mainly a door to door company, and gives those the opportunity who sell for them to become an owner in the company. That means if YOU went out and started selling for them and hit the goals you needed to hit you could become an owner!
Now to become an owner is not an easy task. The first step is to become an manager and manage a sales team for one the company branches. In order to become a manager you have to sell 200 pest control accounts during the year. (It doesn’t just have to be during the summer!) I myself was able to sell 90 over the course of about 4.5 months.
Anyone who has done door to door sales knows that this isn’t a easy task. Once you have sold 200 accounts you can manage a branch! The next step is to recruit a team of sales people who can do a million dollars of revenue within the year! So say you had a team of 20 sales people, each person on average would have to sell $50,000 of pest control!
Once you complete this you become an owner and get to open up your own company branch and basically make stacks on stacks on stacks (or in other words a lot money!)!!
My mentor Devin was in his third year of selling for the company and would be managing the Denver Colorado Branch. He was going for a company record to get ownership faster than anyone who had done it before! The previous record I believe had been 4 or 5 years to hit the required goals.
At the start of the summer it looked like there was a great chance the team was going to sell $1,000,000 in revenue as there were over 30 sales reps hungry and ready to go! Each one had a goal to sell at least 110. If everyone did that he would hit a minimum of $2,000,000 in sales.
As with everything in life though, things didn’t turn out as expected. At the start of the summer the team struggled to get sales (including myself). There were many days where Devin would be the only one to sell a single account!
Slowly but surely we started losing sales reps. By the end of the summer the 35 sales reps had dwindled down to around 16. We were the largest sales team in the whole company yet we wouldn’t perform like the other sales teams some days.
As the summer went by it looked like it was going to be a close call on hitting the $1,000,000. During the entire summer, Devin could have been blaming he wasn’t getting results because the sales reps weren’t knocking, there weren’t any bugs, or that people were quitting the team left and right, but he DIDN’T!
He took ownership of the team not doing well upon himself. With doing that he started to take the necessary action to help the team become successful and start striving for the $1,000,000 goal!
He started having one on one meetings with us to see what he could help us with. He started doing more in depth role plays with us. He would come out and shadow us while knocking and give us tips! He started teaching the team principles from other books to help us better ourselves. He also helped us focus on bringing value to other’s lives.
There were quite a few other things he did as well, but this was one of the main things. As a result the team ended up selling $1,000,000 in revenue that summer and helping Devin become an owner!
For those of you who are building a website, I want you to think of what problems you may be facing. Is your blog not making any money? Is traffic not making it to your website. Is no one clicking on the ads you make? Do you tell yourself the market you are in is to saturated? Whatever reasons you may have for not being successful or things you may be telling yourself why you aren’t succeeding, the real reason is YOU!
If this hurts or offends you, then you can know that what I am saying is true. With this in mind, what can YOU do to fix these problems?? Invest more in your learning/education. Really research your target audience and see what they want! Focus on bringing value to others lives instead of making money. Make a daily or weekly schedule of everything you are going to do to improve your website and add more content to it!
These are just a few of the things you can do to become better! Anyways I hope this summary helped you gain a little bit of insight on what you can do to take more responsibility in your life! If there is anything that I could add to this post to make it better let me know in the comments below!
I would also love to hear how you have applied Extreme Ownership in your life and what it has done for you!