480: Learn To Read, Write, And Think.
01:40:53 Share

This is Jocko podcast number 480 with echo Charles and me Jocko willing good evening echo. Good evening So I went to college to study English. Why did I go to study? Why did I go to college to study English? I went because I had already been in the SEAL teams for What had it been ten years at that point and I knew that writing was very important I was I'd become an officer now. I knew that writing was very important and

You're writing awards, you're writing evaluations, you're writing concept of operations, you're writing operational summaries. It's a lot of writing. I know that sounds weird. And then on top of that, you're reading a bunch. You're reading orders, general orders. You're reading and you have to understand rules of engagement. You're reading and you have to understand after actions reports. You're reading and you have to understand lessons learned. So there's a lot of reading and a lot of writing. And what I realized was the better you could write and read,

the better you could do your job, the better you could execute your mission because you can formulate good concepts of operations that will get approved, the better you could summarize what you've done in an operational summary so you can accomplish your mission better and you can take care of your team better because you've got awards and you want your guys to get awards and you're writing your evaluations for your guys, which is how they get promoted.

And on top of all that, obviously, when you're in a leadership position in the military, you've got to be able to speak. You've got to be able to convey plans. You've got to be able to explain your ideas. You've got to be able to talk through tactics. You've got to be able to explain missions and answer questions in order to get approval. All that's up the chain of command. And then down the chain of command, you've got to speak in a way that the troops actually understand what you're saying.

And understand what the plan is and if you have miscommunications or misunderstandings, they can have catastrophic outcomes for real so The better you write the better you can speak and really the better you can think and i've said this before when you write is a form of detachment It's it's 18 inches of detachment you move 18 inches away from your idea when you write them down so you can look at it and you can make more sense of it So because of all that

When I went to college I studied English which meant I took classes on literature, which is I took classes on you know books poems Plays the whole nine yards, bro. I was in there and I took classes on grammar. I took classes on syntax I took classes on etymology where words came from and quite frankly enjoyed it all learned a lot and I learned mostly from Shakespeare from reading Shakespeare now

Why did I learn a lot from Shakespeare? Shakespeare is written in English, but it's actually written in something called early modern English, which was around from like 1500 to 1800. Before that, there was something called old English, which was 450 to 1100. And then middle English, which is 1100 to 1500. If you've ever heard someone speak in old English, you can't understand it. It sounds freaking wicked cool.

But it's, you can't understand it. Wait, Old English is when you said? 450 to 1100. Is that the like speaketh? No, no, no, no, no, no. Before that even. We're getting there. That's way before. Like you can't understand. I should have brought some in and read it. You can't understand any better than you can understand Spanish. Like occasionally hear a word in Spanish that'll be like.

And you're like, oh, is that, that could be gym, right? Gymnasium, right? So it's kind of the same level of comprehension. That's Old English. Then Middle English, you can understand a little bit more, but it still is not something you're going to understand openly. And then you get to Late Modern English. There's Early Modern English. So Early Modern English, this is, Early Modern English is like 1500 to 1800. Shakespeare was around 1600. So

That's what he's writing. It's something called early modern English. What we speak is called late modern English, starting around 1800 to the present. There's differences. Some of them are pretty significant. There's different word orders that they use. This is where you have things like dost and hath and thou and thee and thy. They're all in there. But those are pretty...

Those are, you can kind of, we even know what those mean right now. But there's other things. There's inconsistent spellings. So when you're reading something, you're like, I don't know what it is. There's archaic words that just don't get used anymore. And so late modern English and what we speak today is very similar. Very similar. But it's not the same. It's not the same. And the very first time I read Shakespeare, I was, I didn't understand it. Didn't understand it. And what I explain to people is you don't understand it when you first read it.

Read Shakespeare. You'll understand chunks of it, but you're not going to understand the meeting. So what I learned how to do was I had to accept the fact, you know, I wrote in way the warrior kid about the kid who the Mark, he doesn't know his timetable. So he thinks he's stupid. And uncle Jake's like, well, bro, did you study? And he's like, well, no. He says, well, you need to study. I went through that same little three minute evolution where I'm reading Shakespeare going, dude, well, I don't understand this. Am I an idiot? Yeah.

Oh, no, this is a little bit, basically a different language. So how am I supposed to be able to understand it? No, you got to get out a dictionary and you got to break it down and you got to figure out what every word means. And then you get understanding of it. We use this dictionary called the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives you where the word came from, when it was first used, how it was used over time. Look, it's very in-depth. And with Shakespeare, what you end up realizing is that

Every word is being used for a very specific reason. Then it has depth and it has meaning and it has nuance and it has layers. The words have layers. Every word counts. So that's what, so I got a lot out of that. And then when I was, got back to the Navy, eventually I had to teach people how to write better. So evaluations, I got 150 people at trade at.

150 people that need to be evaluated. They need written evaluations. Part of it is a number score. We covered that on podcast 174. It's like the, we covered the Marine Corps one and the Navy one, but it's, you get ranked one to five on your little traits, but you also have a little write-up area. And the write-up area is very important.

And it's a certain, I think it's 17 lines that you have. And you've got to be able to make those 17 lines impactful because this is how you get people promoted. Because when they're doing their promotion board, the guy's not in the room, there's no interview, it's just that piece of paper. The number score and what does it say about him? So the better you write about the people, the more chance they have of getting promoted.

So my first year at Trade-Ed, I just had my warrant officers, pretty much there's a warrant officer that's in charge of each one of the cells, land warfare, maritime operations, CQC assaults. So there's a warrant officer in charge of each one of them. I had them give me their write-ups, their drafts of the evaluations, and they weren't good. But I did it too late.

So in other words, I asked for, let's say they were due like in November. Well, I said, okay, you guys turn them in November 1st. They turn them in November 1st, they're not good. No offense to my boys that are out there listening to me right now, but you guys know they weren't good. And I'll tell you how they knew it. So it was too late though to have them go and re, so I rewrote them all. Sat in my office, came into work early and just for three weeks, just sat there and rewrote them all.

So I knew that that was bad. So the next year earlier, much earlier, you know, two months or three months in advance, I said, okay, everyone write the evaluation for your best guy. And then we're going to have a meeting and we had a meeting and I got everyone together and I just brought them up like their evaluation, those 17 lines that they had written. I brought them up one by one.

And the very first one I remember bringing up, I put it on. It was the warrant officers and the mass troops, and I put one up on the board, and I just read the first line aloud of this thing. And you could tell right away, everyone's just, oof, right? It just sounded bad. Everyone knew it.

And we just went through that one and kind of like, okay, what are we trying to say there? We rewrote that line and we did line by line, talked them through the word choice, talked them through simplifying, talked them through removing the words and adding words and the passive voice versus the active voice. Just went through the basic English with them and then sent them back to go try again. And that's what they did. And now the next time when they...

When they had learned how to write basically because you don't get there's no freaking English classes in the Navy There's no seal warrant officer that went to an English class No, they're just going with what they learned in high school, which they probably dropped out of right? So but this time as soon as they learned that process they were a lot better so last week you and I got a question on the underground the underground podcast and

It was basically from a guy who had been you know, he's sending emails to his team and His boss came and was like hey your emails are not good. They're offending people they're causing problems and he wanted to do better and you know, we answered the question but I'm I kept thinking about that because Writing is very difficult

And it's so important. It is so important. You ever had to receive an email that pissed you off? I'm sure I have, but yeah.

That's the you ever received a text that pissed you off. You see what I'm saying? Those are written words and writing is very very difficult to convey a message in writing that you want to pass to someone and as a leader This is something that you have to do a lot of and by the way, we're all leaders So writing is a skill and it's not a natural skill Unfortunately, it's not natural

Any more than playing guitar is natural. Any more than weightlifting is natural or gymnastics is natural. Now, are there people that are naturally a little bit better at weightlifting? Yes, there are. Are there people that are naturally a little bit better at gymnastics? Yes, there are. Are there people that are naturally a little bit better at music? Yes. But it doesn't matter how natural you are at music. If you don't pick up a guitar and practice, you won't be able to play it.

And even if you are naturally gifted and you play it a little bit, you won't be really good unless you practice, unless you learn, unless you learn that skill. And it's the same thing with gymnastics. It's the same thing with weightlifting. It's the same thing with basketball. It's the same thing with anything. It's not a natural skill, but you can get better at all of them and you can get better at writing. And when you get better at writing, it will not just improve your writing. It'll improve the way that you speak. It'll improve the way that you think, and it will improve the way that you lead, right?

So I was kind of gnawing on that and I felt like this question that we got asked, even though we did our best to answer it, there's more to it. You know, I threw some things out in that podcast, like, hey, here's some steps you can take. But number one, I think people need to recognize the importance of it. And number two, how hard it is. And number three, that it's a skill. So I was, you know, being me.

I had recently seen a recently published document from the Command and General Staff College, a military school that commanders and generals go to to learn how to be commanders and generals. And it's called the Professional Writing Guide.

It is from the command and general staff college. And I was like, I want, you know, cause you think military, right? You get a little nervous. You're like, Oh no, here we go. It's going to be strange. Uh, but I looked at, I was like, Oh, pretty good stuff in here. Mm.

Project editors guy named Trent Ly Liff go and then there's a bunch of contributors Alan Boyce Sean Calic Richard McConnell Mary Knoll Bruce reader and they were all working for a group chair named Marvin Nichols So here's a bunch of people a committee which I'm not a big fan of committees But a committee put together and I thought it would be good to bring this out because if you

Interact with other people whether it's text whether it's email whether it's actually writing letters or writing directions or writing instructions or Protocols for people if you don't think about what you're doing You won't become a good writer and if you're not if you don't become a good writer It's gonna negatively impact the way you speak the way you think and the way you lead. So there we go Do you do journal

No. So, but you know what I mean by journal, right? Yes, yes. Or like daily. Because I guess there's different levels of journaling, right? So even, because you still write down your workouts too, right? Yeah, I do that. Is that journaling? I guess, right? In a way. I journal then. In that way you do. I wish I would have journaled. And it's so interesting.

Especially on deployments because everything kind of becomes a blur the closest thing I have to journals from deployments and this is kind of useful is I I had a Like a notebook. Mm-hmm, and I actually have six I think from Ramadi I think I have six of these small smile spiral brown bound notebooks, but I would bring them to all these meetings and briefs and events with me

And I would take notes. You know, if I went to a brigade meeting, I'd come back and tell the guys what was going on. If I was in as...

Sitting through one of our briefs or a battalion brief. I would take notes and ask questions or whatever and I have all those with me Yeah, so in a way there's no dates in it though, unfortunately But the thing it is most of them are some of them have dates, but a lot of them have mission numbers So like when task unit Ramadi was going on a mission I would have sit in the brief and take notes for like hey, what about this? Hey, did you de-conflict with these guys or just be a series of notes, but it would say, you know, I

our missions were numbered and named. And so, and I wouldn't usually write the name. I would just write the number. It'd say, you know, Ram 329, because there was other task units that had their mission numbers and they had different names. Like there was a group in Habana and they were like HAB, like Hab 324. So those were a set of numbers, a set of missions. And then

Wherever the other group was Fallujah FAL to see it to seven two so everyone's numbering our own things of the mindset Ram nine four or we didn't get up to nine hundred but Ram two nine six is so I have those notes Yeah, but it's not really a journal. I wish it was I wish I would have done the the audio even the audio thing of telling what's happening each day because everything you heard when General McFarland was on and like

Everything in my mind, the timing is weird. In my mind, how long things took is not accurate. I was like, dang, we did three or four combat outposts in a few weeks, and they were all so big. Plus, you're awake for so long. I wish I would have done a better job of that. And I tell people now, I'm like, hey, even if you write down...

You know, what's today? Blah, blah, blah. Here's the date. Here's what I did today. Even that to use as reference in the future is a very smart thing to do. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it makes a big difference. Now, I have workout books going back, you know, years. I want to say decades, yes. Yeah. So they kind of, even those notes, they kind of serve in, I mean, journals for a lot of reasons. But yeah.

the workout notes uh even the notes from your your missions and stuff it kind of went like if you go back and read them a lot of memories will probably come popping back in like oh yeah i do remember that which you maybe wouldn't have remembered you know otherwise but yeah i in school elementary school i remember it was like they made us write in a journal just for 15 minutes or something every day oh that's so good yeah when my when my son went to

J-Rob wrestling camp when that was a thing. And you had to keep a journal there. It's so freaking cool to see. So yes, even though I don't journal, I think it's awesome and I would recommend anyone does that. Especially nowadays with the technology that you have that you could hit a record and be like, hey,

This is the day, even if you made a video of yourself every day and just said, Hey, it's January 4th. Just got done working out. I got this project going on and I hurt my left shoulder yesterday, but it's healing. You know what I mean? Just like some random stuff like that is very useful because time becomes very, very skewed and unrecognizable in some cases in your mind. Yeah, man.

my mother sent me a package of old stuff randomly.

Probably, she was probably cleaning out some stuff. So there was old drawings that we drew and all this other stuff. And one of the things was a paper. You know those, I guess we still have them. You know the yellow paper, right? That you're writing on? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The line paper. It was written on that. Legal pad, yeah. Yeah. It's called a legal pad, yep. Yeah. And it was in pencil too, which I don't know, that kind of adds to the oldness of it. But it was like a journal, but you could tell, I don't really remember doing it, but you could tell as punishment because I did something. I think I...

for lack of a better way of putting it, abandoned my younger brother in town. We went down to Koloa Town, which is a town in Kauai. And after school, hell yeah, after school, it was me, my two brothers, some friends, and my younger brother. I abandoned him at some point. It was kind of like a thing. They had to go search for him. Not search, like call the authorities, nothing. But you know, it's like, "Hey, where's your brother?" "Oh, dang, I don't know. We lost him." So we had to go search around town, got him. Anyway, it looked like it was punishment for that, for me losing him, essentially.

So it was basically an account of what happened that whole day. But I was like, what, nine, 10 years old, maybe, you know? And yeah, it's funny to see just all the detail that even the unwritten detail, like just like the fact that it was in pencil, my handwriting at the time and like, you know, the grammar imperfections and stuff like that. It's like it really tells this like robust kind of story, even though some details are obviously left out. You can kind of.

you mix that with your memory and you can kind of start to learn a little bit about the past, you know? Totally. Totally. That's weird. That's good stuff. And, and that's going to be one of the things we'll talk about today. It's just like, Oh, the more you write, the better you'll get. There's no doubt about it. The more you write, the better you get. So let's jump into this book again. This book right here is called, uh, it's called the command in general staff, staff,

College Professional Writing Guide. That's what we're doing. So it kicks off here. It says professional writing. The Command and General Staff College Writing Guide aims to command and general staff college CGSC students improve their writing skills. But this guide isn't just for CGSC students. It can help all Army professionals craft writing that meets Army standards being clear, concise, well-organized, and easy to read and understand. So

Even though it's talking about the army, that's guess what? That's what you want to do as a human. You want your writing to be clear, concise, well-organized, easy to read and understand. That's what we want. This guide's central idea is that writing is a process, not a product. This is important because if you don't understand that and you think that the first thing you write is going to be, should be good to go, you're a total idiot, which I was. And you know what's cool is I have drafts, especially drafts.

Writing extreme ownership. We have like all the drafts, you know, they digitally get saved. Oh, yeah So we have drafts like the very first draft of extreme ownership. It's so bad It's so bad and then by the time we wrote the dichotomy of leadership It was like oh this cleaned up and now meanwhile I was writing warrior kid warrior kid one warrior kid to warrior kid three then I wrote discipline freedom field manual and

And then came dichotomy. And so now I'm like actually writing a lot and editing a lot. So I see like the first draft of dichotomy. It's much better. By the time I got to leadership strategy and tactics, the first draft is like advanced. It is way better than the first draft of extreme ownership. And then, you know, you get to the later warrior kid books. Those are the amount of editing was amazing.

Much less because I was just better I got better over time and and by the way This is coming for someone that wrote a bunch of papers during college and all that crap. So even extreme ownership was Was really bad and I had written a lot and I had paid attention to writing like when you're writing those evals evaluations and awards and stuff that's very very precise writing that has a high demand for accuracy and competency

So I learned that...

What they're saying here writing is a process. That's what it is It says here finally a word of encouragement you can write you will struggle But all writers do because writing is hard do not be disappointed when your writing is not born Perfect writing never is rewrite it use the process this guide can help very important and by the way This is what this is what triggered me to talk about this when you write an email That's an important email you have to write a draft first you have to go back and edit it and I'll get into that stuff but

just because i'm talking about writing books you have to do this with an email too you have to do this with procedures that you're writing you have to do this with a text message right if you're writing a serious text message you got to write through that thing you got to check it and we'll talk about how to do that but but so if you're sitting here thinking well i'm not writing any books press stop no i'm talking about writing a freaking email i'm talking about writing a text to your kids how does it come across you need to think about these things

So that's what we're doing. Then I was a little nervous because the kickoff of this thing was like full military activity and it's writing process quick guide and it's this graph and it says,

Plan, analyze the task, make a writing plan. Next is research. Gather strong evidence, avoid bias, take organized notes, keep track of sources. It just goes through this whole protocol. The next is the draft. Write an introduction, main body, and conclusion. Organize the main body logically. State claims clearly and support them with evidence and reasoning. Consider counter arguments. Integrate. And it goes through this whole thing. I'm not going to read them all.

And look, is it wrong? No, it's not wrong. It's 100% right. But it's very military minded to take this creative process and break it down. And that's actually a good thing. I'm not saying it's bad, but it goes through. The first thing you do is come up with a plan. The next thing you're going to do is do research. The next thing you're going to do is write a draft. Then you're going to revise the draft. Then you're going to edit the draft.

And then you're going to submit it. That's what it does. And then it gives you sort of like what you're trying to accomplish. What you're trying to accomplish is come up with a coherent thesis and then advance that coherent thesis and then use clear, concise sentences and prefer active. So it's giving you a bunch of advice like that. And eventually it's telling you that you're going to be submitting this document. So moving into this first chapter, which is kind of introducing the whole thing.

Writing is hard work. William Zinsser quote here. Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time or even the third time. Think about that. Think about that. Very few sentences come out the right time or even the third time. Or sorry, come out right the first time or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair.

you'll find that writing is hard it's writing is hard it's if you find that writing is hard it's because it is hard now go into the passage here effective professional writing is purposeful credible and clear purposeful writing achieves its aim by meeting the reader's needs credible writing is objective and supported by strong evidence and sound reasoning finally clear writing is simple concise and easy to understand purposeful credible clear writing meets the academic demands

and professional demands of military leadership. So the thing is, this isn't only about writing professional things. This is everything that you do. This is when you write an email to your spouse about what you want to do. This is everything that you do should

Now look, it doesn't mean that you're gonna have, what is it here? Credible, you don't have to bring up credible sources when you email your wife about something. Although you may do that. Hey, I looked into the paint that we wanna get. Here's the paint that I recommend. Here's why I recommend it. You see what I'm saying? And then it gets into this writing myths, which I thought were worth going over. Many people have mistaken beliefs about writing. One of the most common and harmful is that the ability to write well is a rare gift or unique talent. Writing is neither.

Writing is a skill that people can learn and improve. Again, this is just reinforcing what I kicked off with. Anyone willing to work at it can learn to write well.

Other writing myths include, here's a myth. Myth. Writing is easy for good writers, but hard for weak writers. Fact. Writing is hard for everyone. Good writers write well because they work hard at it. Their first drafts are just as terrible as everyone else's and may require many rewrites. Ernest Hemingway, for example, rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 47 times.

Good to know.

Myth, only weak writers need feedback. Fact, all writers benefit from feedback. The best writers seek it out. Feedback helps writers develop and improve. Even successful professional writers get feedback from their editors. Fact, all true. So if you can get someone to look at your stuff, it's going to help you. And it's going to hurt a little bit. That's one of the most direct ways

one of the times where I find direct feedback as opposed to indirect is like writing. Like, hey, this sentence doesn't make sense. Leif and I, when we were going back and forth, especially on extreme ownership, dichotomy as well, but because we needed, because we were worse writers,

And as we, as you're doing it, you're getting better. You know, you get better each time. And, but yeah, I'd be like, you know, Leif would send me like, hey, this sentence doesn't make any sense. This paragraph seems like a waste. And I'd send him back like on, because he's reviewing my writing and I'm reviewing his writing and we're just going back and forth. But just, there's no sort of like tact. It was just very bro. Like, cause I think both of us knew that both of us were trying to achieve the same goal of get a good product out there.

Next one, myth. Good writers have everything figured out before they start writing. Fact, writers rarely know exactly what they will write until they write it. Writing is not just a way of communicating, it is a way of learning. Moving ideas from the brain to the page reveals their strengths and weaknesses. The process of rewriting what is on the page strengthens and sharpens the thinking behind it. Essays evolve as writing and thinking become clearer. So important to think about.

If you, I can tell you right now, like I got so much better and so did Leif at articulating cover and move and simple and prioritize next year because we wrote about them. Now,

That will happen with anything if you're gonna go into a meeting and you're gonna present an idea and you don't write about that idea You don't at least give yourself some bullet points. Hopefully a little bit more detailed than bullet points There's a decent chance you fall on your face. We've got all right I'm gonna go into this meeting and I'm gonna put out some word about some stuff or represents my ideas You better write that stuff down so you can articulate it better and it's not just so you can articulate it better It's so you can understand it better

Writing is very helpful in your ability to think. Another myth, good writing is beautiful. To be sure, here's the fact, to be sure, good literary writing is beautiful. But people read literature for fun in their personal time. At work, people are busy. They expect effective writing that gets to the point.

And the next one, myth, good writing is a matter of opinion. Fact, although beautiful writing is a matter of opinion, good professional writing is not. Cognitive science has discovered well-defined strategy that help writers communicate their ideas. These strategies underpin this writing guide.

there is a difference, right? We're not writing poetry over here. Now, when you're writing poetry, cool, that is subjective. Oh, I think that's a beautiful poem. I think it's stupid. Okay, cool. But what they're saying here is if you're writing a, presenting an idea or a case, there's a professional way to do that and there's cognitive research that shows like, oh yeah, if you present your idea like this and it has these connections and it ties it together, that will be more understood than this dipshit stuff you're doing over here. Yeah.

You ever read a food blog? I don't think so. It doesn't seem like something you read, but you never know. So I know that food blogs or recipe blog type blogs, writing, whatever, get a lot of flack for...

Something which I think what you're talking about now. So let's say there's a recipe of some steak, right? Hell yeah. Hell yeah, right? So you're like, oh, there's an article on how to cook the perfect steak. You're like, hell yeah. You open it up. You start reading. And then the author of this article, who may or may not be a chef, they'll be like, well, it started when I was eight years old and I was by the campfire and all this. And you start getting really angry because like, Brad, just tell me how to make the steak. You see what I'm saying? But they kind of flipped it a little bit. Like they didn't...

maybe consider their audience, I think a lot of the times, where they're like, hey, let me focus on certain dynamics of this writing versus the content of the writing that I'm kind of conveying. See what I'm saying? Yeah. So you're saying certain times you want to hear the story and certain times you don't. Right. Under what circumstances would the story matter? Usually not about a recipe scenario. See what I'm saying? Yeah. Well, true. True.

But if you want to convey a reason why you do things a certain way, then telling a story around it might be important. Yeah. And I think, yeah, under a lot of circumstances, those stories are so helpful. Yeah. I mean, that's basically, again, going back to whether it's a way the warrior kid or warrior

you know, leadership strategy and tactics or extreme ownership. These books are stories that make you understand the principle. And it's usually a good idea to do that. Now, like in leadership strategy and tactics, I talk about here's a principle, here's a story that kind of represents that. And here's the breakdown of the recipe. So there's times where you got to use all three of those things to get the message across.

Getting into the writing process. The secret to writing is rewriting. This is, again, something you just don't understand. If you think you're just going to write a sentence, it's going to be good. Nope. Writing is not just turning ideas into words, sentences, and paragraphs. That is drafting, which is only one activity in the writing process. All writers draft and all first drafts are terrible. Yes, all of them.

Writing is a process that involves six activities, planning, research, drafting, revisiting, or sorry, revising, editing, and submitting. So it goes through planning, which is assessing the writing task and building a writing plan to accomplish it.

Research is collecting, organizing, and analyzing evidence. Drafting is turning ideas and facts into words, sentences, and paragraphs. Revision is rewriting a draft to improve substance organization coherence and cohesion. Editing involves rewriting revision to make it simple, clear, and concise. And by the way, you know what, Ashland Front, we say language has to be simple, clear, and concise. I don't know where I originally...

I think I just used those words and here they're getting used. Again, it's nothing crazy, but I don't know if they seeped into my brain from somewhere else. They very well could have. But we always say simple, clear, and concise language. And here it is. Here they say writing a revision to make it clear, simple, and concise. There you go. Submitting includes proofreading the final draft and submitting the product. Okay, cool. So there's the process. The writing process is nonlinear, right?

Writers go back and forth between these activities as they write and rewrite. Although frustrating at times, this laborious back and forth is necessary to transform disjointed drafts into effortless essays. Fair enough. And this is an important part. Tools, not rules. This is a guide, not a rule book. Writing is not about following rules. It's about making choices. And I just let someone know this the other day. I said there was someone that was working on something, not an official document, but

Not a fully creative document, but they were worried about the editors. And I said, the right, the editor is not the writer. You're the writer. You're the writer. If you make a decision, this is true when you get, if you go in the publishing world and people start telling you they want, like, I think this would be better. You should definitely listen to them and try and understand their perspective. But if you, you should also balance that with the fact that it's your piece and you can't let somebody just change it.

You can let them change some things. You literally go, that's a good point. You have an open mind, but you also have to know when to say, nope, that's actually the sentence I want there. And here's why. So that's important to think about. It's there's rules. For instance, I tend to start sentences with the word and which is like kind of a no, no, but I do it.

- You say it's kind of a no-no, like it's like, 'cause that's what I learned about the word and. It's like it's kind of a no-no. - Yeah, because it's supposed to join two different ideas in one sentence. I'm going to go shopping today and then go to the gym. That's the way it's supposed to be used. So when you say I'm going shopping today, period, and gonna go to the gym, you can see it has a little bit of a different meaning.

Now, that's not the perfect use for it, but I'm saying, but there are times where for me, that's exactly what I want to say. I understand. And there's a reason for it. So sometimes when I would turn in a publication, whether it was Final Spin or whether it was Warrior Kid or whatever, you know, sometimes they would say, hey, you start in the sentence with the word and or start with and here. And sometimes I'd be like, yeah, that's a good point. It doesn't make sense there. But sometimes I'd say, yeah, and here's why. Mm-hmm.

Because I want that to be a standalone thought. I got to do this, this, and this, and this period. And I was still thinking about this. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So you got to take these rules and you got to utilize them, but you can't be a slave to them. Sometimes you got to push back.

And it explains that in here. For example, chapter six in this book advises writers to avoid hyperbole, but chapter five ignores this advice by directing writers to, quote, murder your darlings, a hyperbolic statement urging writers to be ruthless in cutting, murdering passages, darlings, that do not advance the thesis. So here they are. They're admitting. They're saying, hey, don't use hyperbole. You shouldn't use that. And then their next chapter is murder your darlings, which is total hyperbole. So...

Keep that in mind. Using passive voice is another writing choice. The style standard advises writers to use active voice, yet chapter six discusses several situations in which passive voice is more effective. So you're going to have rules and sometimes you're going to have to break the rules when you're writing. Chapter two, plan. Writing is thinking on paper. And this is a, this is a

Very army activity here professional writing begins with a directed purpose, right? The analyze and understand the task. So this is very army ish I gotta throw this out there because it says make a writing plan and look they're correct. They're correct You should make a writing plan. You should day one Monday

analyze task and begin research Tuesday, finish research Wednesday, write the draft Thursday, revise and additional research and drafting Friday, rest Saturday, revise Sunday, rest Monday, edit Tuesday, extra day Wednesday, proofread and submit. So they break it down and then that's like a short essay writing plan. And it is good. It is good. If you don't have a plan, nothing's ever going to get done.

So if you are gonna write something, come up with a plan, come up with a timeline, when is it gonna be due, all those things. You've heard me a thousand times. If you wanna write something, you wanna write a book, you wanna write a screenplay, a thousand words a day. That's what you gotta do. That's my plan. I'm gonna write a thousand words a day. After I figure out kind of the story and the arc of the story, and then it becomes very easy to write a thousand words a day. Chapter three, research. There's a whole thing, it's like,

This is really like professional, like fully professional writing, you know, research and keeping track of sources and two column research note format and citation software. So there's a bunch of stuff in here. I'm not going to go over arguments.

it does get into arguments here writers gather evidence to support arguments arguments are claims supported by evidence and reasoning naturally arguments are central to argumentative essays but they are also important most professional military writing for example

The running estimates army staff officers build during planning require strong arguments. Staff officers gather evidence such as facts and assumptions about friendly forces, the enemy, civilians, and the environment. They analyze this information and recommend courses of action to the commander. These recommendations are claims. We should do X. The staff officers must support with evidence from the running estimate for these reasons, et cetera. So,

What's good about this is, look, if you're writing a book, it's different, but if you're writing a proposal to your marketing chief, your chief marketing officer, and you want a certain amount of money, well, you've got to make an argument of why you should get this money. So this is a very good protocol to follow.

Back to the book, arguments are found, arguments are everywhere in professional writing, point papers, white papers, decision papers. Even an award recommendation is an argument that someone should receive an award for certain achievements. There's your claim as the award and the achievements are the evidence. So even when you're writing awards, you've got to be doing this. And then there goes into bias here.

And it says, I'm fast forwarding, I'm not reading this whole book, but fast forward bias. Bias is any deviation from the truth, intentional or unintentional, that leads to false conclusions. And it goes through some of them. Confirmation bias means collecting and interpreting evidence in a way that confirms the author's predetermined conclusion. It involves gathering evidence to support a conclusion while avoiding downplaying or being unfairly skeptical of disconfirming evidence.

Distorting the facts means using exaggerated or imprecise language to make information seem more or less extreme than it is. For example, everyone knows Douglas MacArthur was a terrible leader.

Everyone is an exaggeration and terrible is in process. What's cool? What is awesome about this book is all the examples in the book are military examples So it's it's like I love that part of it actually Miss misrepresenting sources means paraphrasing or summarizing information incompletely or misleadingly this bias often occurs when authors distort the original author's intent by quoting a source out of context and

Inflammatory bias occurs when writers use language that elicits an unfair emotional response. For example, labeling the irregular soldier of the American Revolution as patriots or terrorists could elicit emotions that lead a reader to biased conclusions.

And then it just talks about how to avoid some of these biases, use credible resources and sources, focus on facts, not an opinion. Here's a good one though, keep an open mind. Having a preliminary guess hypothesis about a topic is normal, but do not commit to a position before doing at least some research. Read broadly, study the range of views on a topic, avoid gathering evidence

only from sources that agree with the preliminary hypothesis. Be willing to change your position. During research, writers sometimes discover that the evidence for their initial position is weak. If so, they must modify or reject weakly supported claims. So it's very interesting and important that you go into your theory, your hypothesis with an open mind.

and you don't just try and bolster your own opinion, which is a freaking bad move. But this is, there's so much press. You can read any, go to the right wing media or the left wing media and you can see this stuff all day. You see those headlines that they produce? And it's like one of them is,

Elon Musk and Doge save trillions of dollars. And the other headline is Elon Musk and Doge cut hundreds, thousands of jobs. Like there you go. We're just, we're just in the game. That inflammatory bias. I never heard of that, but I've heard of that. Obviously that, um, even that, now that we understand this, I think, uh,

You see it pretty much everywhere. Yeah, of course. Pretty much. Like even in headlines. Inflammatory, you know. Leaving hundreds jobless. Yeah, yeah. See what I'm saying? It's like, dang, bro. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Gotta keep your eyes open for that kind of stuff.

Chapter four draft when you first start writing You're scared to death that if you don't get that sentence right that minute It's never gonna show up again and it isn't but it doesn't matter another one will and it'll probably be better and I don't mind writing badly for a couple days because I know I can fix it and fix it again and again and again it'll be better that's from Toni Morrison, this is a very

very critical thing to understand. We'll get into it. Drafting is turning ideas and research into words, sentences, or paragraphs. The goal of drafting is to quickly write the bulk of the essay without stopping to fix style and correction problem or correctness problems. Drafting focuses on quantity, not quality. So this is what I call making the clay. You've heard me use that term before? Making the clay. So what, if you're a sculptor,

- You go to the art store, if you're gonna make a clay pot, you go to the art store and you buy the clay. And then you take that and you form it into the pot, right? With writing, you have to make the clay yourself. And that is just getting the words on paper. And then you take them and shape them.

I'm good at making clay. Leif, he's like constantly going back and rewriting a sentence that he just wrote. Like I'll write 20 pages and not change one single thing and then go back and edit it. Leif will be like one sentence and he'll go back and edit it. That's just the way his mind works. Fast drafting is tough. Many writers cannot resist revising and editing as they draft. Leif Babin.

My brother Leif. But this slows writing and wastes effort. As we see in chapter five, first drafts often require significant cuts, rewriting while drafting risks, wasting time, improving passages that may end up being cut during revision. And that is crazy. I do remember Leif and I were doing like some of the final edits on Extreme Ownership and we were just X-ing out whole paragraphs. You know, like...

half a page gone. Cause it'd be some weird, like little offshoot of a story. And we're like, does that really add like, nope. X. Yeah. Yeah. You, you ever come across those deleted scenes from movies, right? And you know, they're always fun to watch, but some of them you're like, bro, I can't believe they filmed this whole thing, this whole thing. You know, it took like more than a day of shooting. Oh, for sure. I'm currently living through that. There you go. But,

But it's always surprising. Well, not always, but it's a lot of times surprising how much they just did not include. And yeah, a lot of time in my experience, a lot of time it's for that reason of, Hey, it's, it's not necessary. Yep. And it's way better to just throw the right to write it in there. Just like when you're shooting a film here, I am Mr. Film guy, but like when you're shooting a film, you want to get as many different versions and many different takes as you can. Totally makes sense. And so that way you go day of, uh,

Like, well, hey, we might as well shoot it. Let's get it. Hey, let's get, you know, get him spitting the drink out when he's done. Oh, that might be too much. Get him just making a grimace face. Get him turning around and, you know, spitting it out all over the floor. That's, you get them all. Yeah, yeah. And so when you're writing, you'll kind of do that. You kind of like throw these little variations in there because you want to have those options. Better to have it and not need it. Oh, for sure. Than need it and not have it. And the other crazy, it hurts though.

Yes, sir. Both of them. I understand. Like, X-ing out some of those things and edits in my books where I'm like, yeah, that's right. It doesn't really make sense. And definitely, I mean, I've seen some warrior kid stuff go to the cutting room floor, as they call it. And you go, gosh, that's such a cool little moment. You know, really, really? And then you look at it and you go, for the good of the entire industry,

the entire holistic view, they're right, I'm right, or they're right, or I'm wrong, or whatever. And it's really difficult 'cause a movie's an hour and a half, two hours long.

You might not recognize like oh, I didn't really realize I was kind of pulled off track and this this story didn't you know I got to learn something but it didn't get it didn't deliver me anything in the end Like I make a movie about echo and at one point I'm like and here's echo, you know pouring some lucky charms and he's sitting watching TV. Well, I

It's cool that I know that and you're maybe you're doing funny stuff picking the marshmallows. I think there's a bunch of funny things that can happen there. Yeah, but it doesn't add to our story Yeah, and so therefore got to go and that was might have been you some of your some of your best acting row Could've been there. So there is this what? Some book but I can't remember what book it is. It's about this the creative process or something anyway, so

The idea here, and this is what they called it, fetishizing techniques. So in this pretty much any creative thing where like writing, for example, if you like to use certain words, I just love this word, right? And you made this sentence that was like, dang, that sentence really came out really good, right? Yeah.

But it didn't, you know, it didn't make the cutting room floor or whatever. It didn't add to the story, we'll say. It was unnecessary. But you go to bat for that sentence to keep it in because you fetishized your technique where it's like, okay, so in video making, me and Kerry will laugh about this. I usually, I used to use lens flares, right? Like artificial lens flares to make it look more dramatic. I freaking love the technique, you know? Yeah.

Nowadays, a little bit less. But at the time, I loved the technique. That's fetishizing the techniques to put lens flares on something that does not need lens flares. But since I love lens flares, I'm fetishizing it and freaking going down my way to include it and keep it in there. But I ruined the overall work in a way. You've run that risk. Oh, I know what it was. You know the 48 Laws of Power guy? Green. Green, green. Yeah. He has a book called Mastery. I'm pretty sure that's where it's from. Watch out for fetishizing techniques.

God.

So it's like just like how you said like if I I'm pouring the lucky charms and maybe I liked the way the light shined off my head or something like this and I've really thought the way I delivered that Line or whatever was really good. Oh man. I really need that I'm fetishizing my technique right there, you know, but it doesn't add to it It can hurt man. It can hurt in the writing realm. It can hurt now Again, I mean like the movie realm you're like But I kind of get it I understand you kind of get it there's a

Some things that you could do this in writing you can do this and you can do this when you speak So when you make a point when you speak and your point is made be quiet. Mm-hmm now I could say that I could say when your point is

When you make a point and you speak, be quiet. Because then that moment of when you are quiet will let the thing... You see, I just did it. I just kept talking when I didn't need to keep talking. So you got to be careful of that. Well, that can happen in writing where you're like adding too many things in where that point that you want to make is now...

And same things in film. It's like, oh, this was cool. This was a cool like eight to 10. This was a five. This was a six. This was a seven. And those are all really good. And then I got the nine at the end. Well, it's better just to go zero, zero, two, zero, one, nine. Boom. Yeah.

See what I'm saying? - Bro, that's even with like regular conversation. So, probably used to do this thing. I don't know if, I feel like this is an example of that. It's just so small and subtle, but it's there. So, let's say me and you are watching a movie. We're little kids, right? We're watching a movie. You come in halfway through the movie or whatever, I'm following the movie, I'm tracking it hardcore.

And you're like, oh, what happened? Who's this? And you're like, oh, this guy is about to go on this trip with this guy. But this guy, the actual killer, the guy with the red, let's say there's four guys in the scene. The guy with the red shirt, the guy with the blonde. See right there, you know? And I'd be like, okay, you already know the guy with the red shirt. You already know. But I want to over, like...

i want to make sure that you got it you got my point so i overstated i over explained it over everything but right you get in the way of your own your own uh mission you see what i'm saying when you do that kind of stuff yeah yeah you got it there's uh it's also when you hit something too much on the head yeah so i think i heard rogan joe rogan talking about this

Like if you're doing comedy, if I give the punchline too early, it doesn't work because you haven't even, if I'm telling you a joke and I give you the punchline too early, you haven't even computed what's happening. So if I give it too early, it doesn't work.

If I give it too late, you already figured out the punchline in your own head and it's not there. So I need to get you to a point where you're thinking what could the punchline be but you don't quite know. You've put the calculus together to figure out that there's gonna be an answer and you understand the question, you don't know what the answer is. If I give you the answer too quick, you don't even know what the question was. If I give you the answer too late, you figure it out for yourself.

So that's the kind of thing you got to pay attention to and it's the same thing when you're trying to make a point with your writing If you hint at something nine times, well, they already figured out now It's the foregone conclusion if you don't if you come out of left field with your principle or your point then it's like wait What is this from reference to so you gotta land it? Yeah, you gotta land it. That's what we're doing. Yeah, that's crazy How that small subtlety can make it the difference between someone who's like good and yeah comedy is like a

That one feels like it hits so hard when it's done right and wrong because it's like they really have to invoke certain emotions or whatever, but it goes for anything. But it's crazy how just that little, literally like not even half a second. Not even half a second. Not even, and all it is is timing. Forget the tone, which is part of it too, of course, but just, let's say just the timing alone, half a second can be literally be the difference of something being good versus straight up junk. Yep, like I missed it. I missed it. Missed it. Or,

I already knew that and so it's not funny. Obviously, that's the answer. Why did the chicken cross the road? You need to understand what that is before to get to the other side of whatever the punchline is. That's the way all this stuff is. You want to have people to have some indication of it in their brain but not have the solidified answer. They gotta understand the question,

Know that there's an answer not quite sure what it is and then give it to them Yeah, if you wait till they already figured out it's not funny or it's not good. It's not a good point. Yeah, so That's what we're doing that's

You know movies where it all comes to, like the sixth sense? Where it all comes together in the end and you go, oh, damn. Oh, like the twist. Do you mean the end? Yeah, the twist. And same thing with Fight Club, right? That's all like, oh, you're with the whole story, but then you go, oh, it all makes sense in the end. Imagine if, like, you could go too long with that. Yeah.

Where it's like, oh. Or you could be too... The two things could be so far separated that you're like, wait a second. Oh, you're trying to say that that was all fake? Like, you got to land it. Perfect example right there. Yeah. And you got a hint at it. Got a hint at it. But you can't give it away. Yeah, exactly right. Because if you don't hint at it at all, yeah, just like I said, it comes out left field and it doesn't make sense. Doesn't make sense. And you're kind of insulted in a way. Yeah, yeah. So it's like just that subtle difference. Have you ever seen one of those mystery movies where you're like...

The killer, it's like, well, you never could have figured that out. That's a crap mystery movie. And the other end of the mystery movie is like, you know who did it. So it's got to be right there. It's got to be right there in the middle. Check. Do not try to write a perfect first draft or even a good one. All first drafts are ugly. Do not try and make them otherwise.

Draft fast then this thing goes in this whole like formatting deal Which I'm not even gonna get into structure introduction main body conclusion It goes through a bunch of this stuff because it's talking about writing Army manuals and whatnot, which is cool Chapter 5 is revised when a draft is completed the job of writing can begin. This is similar to Tim Ferriss and he he told me this and then

He's like said it a bunch, but he says oh, yeah when you're done writing your book you're halfway there Which is probably an underestimate right? You're an overestimate. You're probably not even have like when you're done with your first draft your bottom You're probably not even halfway there. Mm-hmm. I will say though as I've written more books I'm way closer like extreme ownership wasn't even halfway there's probably 30% there. Mm-hmm

Leadership strategy and tactics was probably 70% there. Way of the warrior kid five was like pretty good. Makes sense. Yeah, because you get better at it. Fast forward a little bit. Revising means re-seeing.

Writing to ensure it says what the writer intends paper level revision improves the essay substance and organization paragraph level revisions improves paragraphs think about when you're going to a meeting and you've thought through and you've written down and you've You've said something to yourself and then you go I could say that a little bit better and you dial all that in then you go into the meeting Mm-hmm. You're gonna be so much better off and that's what this is writing is thinking writing is not the product of thinking it is thinking

I've had people say,

Either they were writing me a question. I was going to write you an email, but then I figured out the answer. They'll say like, someone will be asking me a question. And as they're asking me a question, they already know the answer. It's true. And then I know what you're going to say. It's like, yeah, I'm going to say good. No, but that happens. And that's what writing does for you. It totally does. Also too, and I don't know if you're going to say this or not. So forgive me if I, spoiler, but. Give away the punchline. Yeah. Well, so you say writing is thinking. So you know how like,

okay, we got to write little scripts, you know, for, I don't know, Jocko Fuel video or something, you know, whatever, where you could start, and they say this with like any kind of process strategies, you know, your writing process, you know, some people, they say, hey, just start with the end. You know, these are all process strategies. Where you could go on and they say, when you're staring at the blank paper is the most frightening part of writing or whatever, staring at the... So they say...

just start, just write something, right? For this reason, because writing is thinking. It's like, if you're sitting on the blank paper, it makes sense that it's like, well, you're not doing much thinking right now. You're trying for sure, you know, but you're going to do a lot more thinking if you actually start writing. So, and if you notice, well,

whether this happens every single time or sometimes to me, pretty much every time. If you just start writing something, first word that comes to mind when you think about whatever you're trying to write, first word, just write the first word, first sentence. You'd be surprised how many more sentences follow. Some good, some bad. But it's part of that attitude.

the actual thinking process. You know what I'm saying? The first line and the last line you write, there was no plan right there. You thought of one word and then you sort of thought your way through it essentially, just through writing. So it is. There's some people on Twitter X that like when I post in the morning, whatever I post, they'll write Jocko prompts and they'll like write some kind of, write about whatever, you know, if I said,

Get up and get after it. And they'll be like, get up, do it again. You know, they'll like write these little things. It's kind of like the same thing you're talking about. A little additional oomph on the whole thing. Yeah. You know? But to your point, once you start writing, it will flow, for lack of a better word. Yeah, so much. Like basically that first line will say, provokes...

More thought which provokes more lines. Yeah, which provokes more. It's sort of like when we talk about hey If you don't know what you're doing start walking Yeah, I don't know what to write start writing and you'll start you at least maybe you'll figure out like this is a dumb sentence I need to do a different one. Okay, go do different one. No factor It says good writers sometimes discover in the act of writing that what looked persuasive when floating vaguely in the mind looks foolish when moored to the page Deidre McCloskey

Which is what I say. This is detachment. Oh, I want to... You know, I got a good idea. Write it down. Write it down and look at it. I'm not sure how we could overcome this. Okay, write it down and look at it. That is detachment. You will see it more clearly. There's a weird thing when you're in SEAL teams. You come up where you got to go attack a target. And you come up with a plan, like a really rough plan. You can't... You have to actually start planning before you figure out if it's going to work or not. Like at some point you go...

Like hey, I think we should hit it from the north you go. Okay cool Like let's start that planning you you you have to start the planning To see if it's gonna work or not and that's the same thing what you were just talking about like

I have an idea. I have to start writing to see if it's a good idea or not. I have to start because you might, we're going to attack from the North. Okay, cool. Go start the planning. Hey, we started the planning. We looked at the terrain. It turns out there's a big cliff. We won't be able to get up and over. Okay, cool. Well, now we know that. So it gives us three choices, you know, Southeast West. Well, let's go look at those. But you have to start the planning. You have to start bringing some granularity to the picture before you know if it's going to be functional or not.

So, very good. Writing is a form of detachment that is extremely helpful. Next thing, to revise a paper, reread it to answer these questions. Does the paper achieve its purpose? Does it answer the questions? Does the introduction discuss the topic, state the thesis? This is very technical. Is the thesis statement clear? Does each major section in the paragraph in the main body build? So, this is sort of just a way to revise these more technical papers.

Professional papers I should have used it. I like that word technical And then it's got a quote here the very the essence of writing is rewriting very few writers say on their first try exactly what they want to say It's like yup ain't that the truth and here's the murder your darlings piece paper level revision often reveals passages that do not advance the thesis That's a good way of saying what we were talking about does not advance the thesis doesn't advance the plot doesn't show us anything more about the character and

And by the way, if I show like, if I want to show Echo Charles as being an OCD type person and I show him like organizing his silverware and then organizing his plates. And then the next scene I show him organizing his toothbrush and his, it's like at a certain point we already know the thing. Yeah.

So is it adding? No. Remove them. Or as experienced writers say, murder your darlings. As this dramatic metaphor implies, removing unnecessary passages is often painful. Writing is hard work. Throwing away some of that work can feel like killing something loved. But removing excess is essential to produce clear, concise writing. Good writers are ruthless editors. Pretty cool.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story, and that is Stephen King. And it's got this meal model, this meal model here. Meal is a model for organizing paragraphs. Meal stands for main idea, evidence, and analysis, and link back to the larger claim.

I know I circled this for a reason. It says the topic sentence states the paragraph's main ideas, the middle sentence discuss the evidence and the analysis that support the main idea. The last sentence links the paragraph to the main idea of the paragraph section or paper. Not bad. I don't know why I got hyped on that. Usually I have some like good reason. I don't know why that thing hyped me or I make a note if I think I'm going to forget it. Next one, chapter six, fast forward.

Clutter is the disease of American writing Williams insert and again why I've used Williams insert quote a few times he wrote this book called on writing well, which is kind of a kind of a you know, they're kind of a very hot good standard less kind of love you want to learn how to write get on writing well by his answer so That's why he's quoted in here a bunch Writing standards to focus on when editing first part of style write clearly so the text is easy to read and understand and

prefer clear, concise sentences, prefer simple words and omit unnecessary words, prefer active voice.

Maintain a professional tone, formal but conversational and confident. So what's interesting to note here is it says prefer clear, concise languages, prefer simple words. So you might, you got to lean towards those, have a bias towards those, but you might have to go with the other methodology sometimes. Correctness, use conventional punctuation, spelling and grammar, cite all sources and format citations correctly.

Yeah. You got to use the proper stuff. Proper. I took a class in college called advanced grammar and syntax. Yeah.

What's crazy is like English is the wildest dumbest language like there's things in English that make no sense whatsoever You know like it's just you just rules that rules that applies 92% of the time yeah, and then it's just out of left field with some just look at our dumb spellings we have in English they make no sense yeah, and there's man I

Come across these like explanations for all this and I think it has to do with cuz English is a bit. Oh, yeah There's always a reason for it Comedian back in the day 80s 70s, maybe Gallagher's name. Yeah, but he did some very insightful You know monologues and stuff like that sometime and so one time he went over English. Oh, yeah, and he was like

I was in school or something along the lines of, I was in school and they're telling me to take, take my class seriously. But why would I take this class seriously when it doesn't take me seriously or something like that? Right. Then he goes and he does little diagram where it's like, okay, uh,

what is it? It was like womb, tomb, some, numb, all these words that rhyme with each other and or are spelt like each other, but just change the first line. And it becomes a whole different word and sound different or whatever. And it's like, but man, I remember as a little kid, I was like, yeah, bro, why is that? It'd be way more simple if it was more cohesive or whatever, but man, it gets, and it goes deep too. At some point,

hopefully these things will evolve. But the reason that English is like that is one of the things that makes English so

widely used is that it is very adaptive but you know just like democracy you know you got you got outliers that like make it it's not perfect it's not always pretty you know like you're gonna get some get some wild things going on yeah like you know the word right i'm sitting here looking at my notes i'm like right well there's w-r-i-t-e and then there's right r-i-g-h-t and then there's r-i-t-e yeah

Three words all spelled different, all mean random different things. Yeah. Like a rite of passage. Yeah. Or I have the right to do this or I'm going to write this down. Like this is one example off the top of my notes right here that is all jacked up. Oh, yeah. Then you have live and live, which kind are the same thing, but they're different. They're spelled the exact same way. So now you can't just read the word. You got to read the sentence to even know what the word means. Like, bruh, it kind of gets...

Or lead and lead. Yeah. And lead. Red and read. Yeah, it freaking gets crazy. Yeah, so it comes to the point where you basically just got to memorize stuff. Yeah, some of it you just got to memorize. But that's why also English is like there's leeway in English. Like I'll do it that way if I want to. Hey, I went to war.

For the word jujitsu the way that we spelled jujitsu mm-hmm Jiu - J ITSU that was not the accepted way I think it might that it was my editors like we can't know this is wrong. Here's this here's the Oxford English Dictionary Here's the Japanese talk about all that. Everyone's like no, but the way we spell it is

Us modern jujitsu players, the way we spell it, they were like, I had to go to war to spell jujitsu the way we spell jujitsu. And I won. And it'll be interesting to see in a few years if that becomes the way that everyone spells jujitsu. Yeah, because I guess even on a technical level, it's a different thing, that's why, right? Than the like...

Japanese Jiu Jitsu or whatever. It is, but it isn't. Right. But at the end of the day, it isn't either. Okay. So look, I guess this, this will kind of be reduced to a philosophical argument. Fair enough. But it was Shanji Hibera who is explaining this. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, there was an original way, just like there was an original actual jiu-jitsu. But things basically between then and now, things change. And the spelling is just one of those things. And therefore these reasons and all this stuff. So it's like, yeah, you can stick to the original way in whatever way you want. And at the end of the day, you can change.

Change and do this or whatever, but hey, this is like the general understood. Yep thing I should have the notes because they weren't just they were giving me multiple different options like well Juj on there to give me that option They give me a bunch of options. None of them were the way that we spell it right now, right? Oh

And so had to hold the hold the line on that one. Well, I guess the question would at the end of the day be, what is the thing that we are doing when we say when we say jujitsu? That came from Haley and Carlos. How were they spelling it when they were like, hey, UFC won 1993, Denver, Colorado. This guy does karate. This guy does ninjitsu. This guy hoist crazy does karate.

Gracie jujitsu. How does that one spell? That's how we're spelling it. Yeah, that's how I spelled it. Otherwise we're doing something else. That's like when these people try to tell me how to tie my belt. Yeah, I tie my belt. The way Hicks and Gracie told me how to tell my belt. Roger that. That's what I'm doing. There you go. All right. A little quote here. The first duty in writing a sentence is to make it clear. Once again, that's Deidre McCloskey. Here's a couple clear writing. They give a couple examples of vague versus concrete.

Ridgeway's leadership impacted the Eighth Army. It's kind of vague, right? Here's the concrete version. Ridgeway improved the Eighth Army's fighting spirit. Much more concrete. Vague. Napoleon had a lot of leadership experience. Concrete. Napoleon had 10 years of leadership experience. Vague. The S4 is working the fuel problem. Concrete. The S4 ordered extra deliveries to fix the fuel problem. So just things to think about. And again,

Well reading these things aloud you can you can almost immediately see the differences cliche finding the enemy is like finding a needle in the haystack Concrete finding the enemy is difficult cliche. She thinks outside the box Concrete she thinks creatively I think outside the box is used so much right now that creatively is a better way of saying it Hyperbole the battalion commander wanted to kill them concrete the battalion commander was angry and

Hyperbole, Ridgeway was the epitome of military leadership. Concrete, Ridgeway was an effective leader. Now look, there's going to be times when either one of those is going to work. One working better than the other. And then there's a section on active and passive voice, which is something that you learned in English, which you should pay attention to. Passive voice, the high ground was occupied by the battalion and the attack was defeated.

As opposed to active voice, which is preferred in most cases, the battalion occupied the high ground and defeated the attack. Here's a simpler version. Passive voice, the operation was planned by Patton. Active voice, Patton planned the operation. See how those two work? And you see the superiority of it? So we always try and use active voice as much as we possibly can, unless there's a reason. And then it's got a bunch of complex words versus simple words.

Assistance versus help. Numerous versus many. Initial versus first. Sufficient versus enough. Attempt versus try. Utilize versus use. Expedite versus hurry. Erroneous versus wrong. Cognizant versus aware. So sometimes does it make sense to use a word that is more specific and it really lands perfectly? Yeah, absolutely.

But sometimes the word, the simplest straightforward word is the word that you want to go with. Here's a wordy version. Wordy versus, wordy version versus concise version. Eisenhower took an opportunity to conduct a rapid assessment of the problem that he was facing. Concise. Eisenhower assessed the problem.

Wordy coda failed to demonstrate an ability as the commander to understand the operational environment He was operating in concise coda did not understand the operational environment so much better Sometimes yes, sometimes if you're bringing more perspective detailed nuance to a statement that's important absolutely absolutely

But there's a reason that you kind of tracked on that one. Coda failed to demonstrate an ability as a commander to understand the operational environment he was operating in. That's a lot, right? Yeah, fully. Coda did not understand the operational environment. That is just boom, straightforward. Yeah. I think you're right at the end of the day and I'm basically checking my bias right now because I do like the comedy elements of things in a lot of cases. So

You know how you can downplay stuff and you can like upplay stuff, you know? So basically you can use a wordy version to downplay something and you'd use a less, what is it? Concise version to upplay stuff. So, okay. Leif Babin, our friend, we love him. He said, he says, when he's talking about buds, he's,

We talk about training. We're talking about training. And he was like, I'm not. He's like, I'm talking about advanced training. I'm not talking about buds. Buds is just a screening process to screen out the people who we don't think have the characteristics to be successful on the battlefield. That's how he put it. It's a wordy version. Right. And you even said it. I don't know when you I forget when you said you were like,

Yeah, basically to weed out the pussies. That's what you said. That's the concise version. See what I'm saying? But the reason that I found that like funny is because when you think about, yeah, but just emotionally, I think when you say weed out the pussy, that's kind of how it feels. You know, buds is hard. It's hardcore. You got to be tough. You got to be.

kind of hardcore and when you make it through you're badass right that's kind of the feeling of buds anyway just the feeling i'm saying the words the feeling yeah so when you say it in that wordy like it just simply screens out the individuals we don't think have the characteristics of being successful in the battlefield it's kind of like you downplay the badassness and just really reduce it to this really technical kind of thing it's funny yeah because okay i get it yeah because it is funny because it's also like

When you say when someone's like, oh, yeah, we had an enemy fighter that was moving down the street towards our position and we interdicted him and eliminated the threat. Yeah. As opposed to like, oh, he smoked that fool. So both those things have a moment where, yes, that's the correct version to use for the correct response that you're looking to get for the message that you're trying to convey. Yeah.

They both can be correct depending on the time that they're delivered. There's one time where they would be totally incorrect to be like, we smoked him or we weeded out the pussies. Like there's times where that's just not the thing to say. Just like there's times where that long, arduous technical version would be the not thing to say. Yeah. So that's the way it works. We got to choose. That's why this is only a guide. Yeah. Because you got to know your audience. You got to know the message that you're trying to convey. Yeah.

Fast forward a little bit here. So avoid nominalizations. Nominalizations are nouns created from other parts of speech, such as adjectives, quick becomes quickness. Other nouns, favorite becomes favoritism. And verbs, prepare becomes preparation. Nominalizations clutter writing because they require writers to add a verb to make sentences work. So, and they just...

This is to me is just the interesting thing about the English language. The nominalization conduct an attack. You could just say attack. Nominalization conduct a defense or defend. Make preparations. Prepare, dude. Make a decision. Decide. Take action. Act. Give a response. Respond. Bring to an end. End. Hold a meeting.

Meet. Make a recommendation. Recommend. Take into consideration. Consider. Have the ability. Can. So very smart to do that. And almost done with this, but the final chapter is submit. And I'll close this out here because this is probably, this is kind of what I wanted to get to, proofreading.

Proofreading for errors is the last step before submitting. Techniques for effective proofreading include, and these are the important things to think about, let the paper rest for a day or two after the final edit. What does that mean to us? It means if you're about to send a text, freaking write the text in your notes so you don't accidentally hit the send button, come back to it an hour later and reread it. Email, same thing. You got to write an email to someone, like that's a meaningful email.

Write it without putting the address. I was with someone the other day and they were like gonna start making edits and they removed the address. That way they didn't accidentally hit send. It's problematic. So don't put the address in there and write the email. And depending on how much time you have, an hour, two hours, next day, you can read that thing with a fresh mind. It's so important to do that. Next one, read the paper aloud to hear errors.

Very smart. This is for me. This is the best The first step to take and it makes a huge difference when I when I brought my warrant officers and mass streets in and was like, okay Put up the evaluation. I'm gonna read your first sentence aloud as soon as I did that everyone's good Everyone probably improved 50% right then just by going and doing that. Mm-hmm cuz it's things sound good or bad when you read them aloud

And yeah, I guess this is kind of a side note, but still, I think relevant where you got to be responsible with reading that kind of stuff, though, too, though, in this way. So you watch Fight Club? Yes. We all love Fight Club. So the famous line in Fight Club is first rule of Fight Club. You do not talk about Fight Club when Tyler Durden says it sounds dope. Always has always will. We're going to love it.

There's a part in Fight Club where Ed Norton is at work and his boss finds a copy of the rules of Fight Club in like the printer or whatever. Right. He finds it and he comes in his office super irritated with the guy, Ed Norton. And he goes, the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club.

The second rule of fight, is this yours? So he read it in that tone to make it sound stupid. See what I'm saying? So you gotta be responsible with this kind of stuff. - Yes, and you have to proactively do that. So if I'm writing you, Echo Charles, an email,

that I know is about a sensitive topic, something that you're very emotional about, I gotta read it like that. I gotta read it in a negative way. And actually, I know Jamie does this at the assembly. They have a couple emails and they'll read them in two different tones. And where that came from was,

Jamie called me and she was like tell me about this client wrote this email and she's like listen to this email She was pissed right and I go okay. I go let me read it and it was totally different Because when I say Hey echo, I wanted to ask you a question. Okay, so

Echo I want to ask you a question. You don't say like it's totally different. Yeah, just in just in the tone So you're right you have to pay attention to how that thing is going to sound and you have to read it from the worst case scenario Read it that echo Charles is looking to be mad at me. Mm-hmm So it doesn't say hey echo. I wanted to ask you a question. It says hey echo. I want to ask you a question Totally different things

So you're right. You have to read things aloud. And so you'll get, some of it will just be the comprehension of it, but the tone will definitely start to come out if you do it properly. And this one is a little bit more for...

The way that you've written it it's read the paper one sentence at a time from end to beginning This technique focuses the writer on one sentence at a time rather than big ideas So if you really want to this is if you're really trying to clean up a document You read one sentence at the time from the end of it and read it backwards because it makes you it makes you really focus on the act each actual individual sentence and

The next one, ask a friend or someone else, preferably someone who is not familiar with the subject to read it and give feedback. That's good. And I'd say you absolutely, if you have a document that's important, you have to have someone else read it. At a minimum, you got to give yourself time away from that document. And there's, you reach a certain point. If you've edited something 50 times, like your 51st is worthless. I don't know that I should try and come up with a realistic number.

It's probably different for different people like I've worked with editors before like professional editors, bro They're they're psycho because they can edit something 500 times and still be like notice something that's wrong like I remember we on extreme ownership there was a there was a really late version like post publisher editors where like leadership or something was spelled wrong and

We're like, damn dude, that's scary. That's scary. So give yourself time away from it so it becomes fresh in your mind again. But also having someone that hasn't seen it yet is a very powerful way to do it. And get things cleaned up as much as you can before you give it to someone else. Because otherwise, I talk about mowing grass. So if you have like a field,

You look at the field, it all looks like, let's call it five inch grass. It's overgrown, right? You don't see that there's rocks and sticks. You don't even see them. So you got to get out there and get it down to three inches. Now you can go out and remove some sticks. Once you got the sticks out of there, now you can get...

You can start to really do good editing so for the courtesy of the person that's gonna be reading it get get it mowed down to a point that you've gotten the big sticks out of there you don't want them hitting rocks and stuff on their mower you know it's it's not cool because then they're not gonna see the smaller errors that are in there yeah yeah that and even that that whole um it's like sleeping on it or whatever like detaching yourself from it for a little bit to reintroduce yourself to it to

see it with fresh eyes. It feels like all of this actually in one way or another applies to most creative work. I would say that's probably accurate. So every once in a while we'll find out or we'll realize that if you have something that isn't quite working, right? Let's say it's like, eh, it's not perfect. This could be better. It's one little sentence in a book or whatever. But you're so tunnel vision from reading it over and over and over and writing and reading and reading over and over, you start before you correct it, I mean.

you start your brain almost subconsciously starts to slowly accept it as being like correct or just fine or part of the thing. Cause you're just so used to it, you know? So yeah,

Now when you watch it, it doesn't stick out as hardcore as a big mistake. Just 'cause you're just used to it. You're used to it. You're not like, you haven't accepted it on a creative level. You've accepted it on more of a routine level. You see what I'm saying? So then yeah, when you abandon it for a little bit, then come back, it'll start to stick out more, you know, if it's incorrect. - And then the last one, it just talks about software raids, which I haven't used. Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, The Writer's Diet, Microsoft. I haven't used any of these.

And now you've course now you've got chat GPT and the other grok which is Twitter's or X's AI so you got other tools that can do this stuff now, which I haven't used those I've used I've put stuff into Like when I when I edit on I use Microsoft they they're giving you grammar subject suggestions and

you can get one thing that's kind of cool. You can do with chat GPT or some of these other ones is let's say you've got, you know, you've got a thesaurus that will give you another word for a word. But if you've got a phrase, you know, uh, I'm getting nickel and dimed over here, right? What's another way of saying that?

you can go into chat GPT and say, what's another way of saying nickel and dime? So there are some, it's almost like a sentence, the source that you can use. So those can be good, but those are other ways to proofread. And-

there you go that's what i got then the rest of this thing is like a bunch of sections on like fonts which is funny for the military because the military makes fun of the fact that like you use the wrong font on this slide like that's for real formatting citations bibliography usage conventions uh there's a freaking professional writing rubric in here which is how to judge work which i thought was funny

And then finally, this is just the conclusion that they say. Publishing, writing is an essential part of being a professional soldier. Writing connects people and ideas and it promotes professional discourse and debate. The writing and publishing process is challenging but rewarding. Write and publish. You might change the army. So there you go. That's it. Writing connects people. Writing connects ideas. Writing makes you smarter.

Writing will help you speak better. Writing will help you think better. Writing is not easy. It is a skill that you have to learn and you should focus on it. You should recognize it and you should go out and you should write more. You'll get better at it. It'll make you better at everything. So there we go. That's what I got. And by the way, we can't just write and think and speak and get smarter. Those are all cognitive processes. Guess what else we're doing?

Lay it on me. Physical activities. We're training. We're spelling jujitsu right and we're training jujitsu. Yep. And we're getting after it so that means we're going to need fuel. We recommend Jocko Fuel. JockoFuel.com. You can get protein. You can get hydration. You can get greens. You can get energy drink. You can get pre-workout.

I've started trying pre-workout at certain times. It is kind of fire. It's a wild ride. Yeah, it's a wild ride. So we got that. We got joint health, joint warfare, super cruel. We got everything that you need. You need to be healthier, stronger, smarter, better. JockoFuel.com. You can get it there. You can also get it at Walmart. You can get it at Wawa, Vitamin Shop, GNC, Military Commissaries, A-Fees, Hannaford, Dash Stores down in Maryland, Wake Fern, ShopRite, HEB down in Texas.

Meyer up in the Midwest Wegmans Harris Teeter Publix down in Florida We got you covered also lifetime fitness shields and then a bunch of little gyms small gyms all over the place Jiu-jitsu gyms spelled correctly powerlifting gyms We got you if you don't have it there email JF sales at jockelfield.com. That's what we got going on also Origin USA comm making everything that you need to wear. I had a suitcase the other day that was entirely packed and

with Origin USA. All Origin. Yeah. We got it all. I guess I didn't have, we have, there are Origin socks. I don't have any at this time. Oh dang. Which is a bummer. That makes one of us. You got Origin socks? Hell yeah. I do. Okay. Well, we got everything that you need. Workout clothing, jujitsu clothing, rash guards, geese, jujitsu belts, by the way. We still haven't determined what belt is going to be utilized. We're sticking with the old one right now. The new one,

I don't know. We'll see. Hunt gear, rain jackets, wind jackets, jeans, obviously, boots, just everything that you need. By the way, did you get the new boots yet? Did you get a pair of mock toes yet? No. Game changer. All day. All day. All day. So check it out. OriginUSA.com. These things are not made by slave labor. They're not made by 12-year-old girls who are being abused.

They're not made by people that are chained in a factory somewhere in unsafe working conditions. No, this stuff is made here in America. Made by freedom. OriginUSA.com. Check it out. It's true. Also, Jocko has a store called Jocko's Store. So, hey, look, we're on this path. Some of us together, some of us solo, you know, it's all our own path. But if you want to represent on this path.

attire wise discipline equals freedom is where you can get your uh shirts hats hoodies some shorts on on there as well some socks on there various things jocostore.com hey look so you know so i was reading this book a habit books like atomic habits so one of the uh premises in there was uh

Reduce friction, right? Reduce the friction of your habit. You know, they make it, make it this and make it that, but you got to reduce the friction. You know how like, and you talk about this where if you want to get on a better diet or whatever, just keep the junk food out of your house. That's reducing the friction. You see the junk food, there's friction there against your new habit that you want. See what I'm saying? Anyway, reduce the friction. So if you put on a shirt that says discipline equals freedom and you want to get, you want to improve your workout schedule or something like this,

Reduces the friction. Hell yeah. Bro, I dare you to skip a workout wearing discipline equals freedom. Not happening. It's not going to happen. Not happening. 100%. Impossible. 100%? It's literally impossible. 100%. Also on Jocko's store is the shirt locker. New designs every month. Subscription scenario. A little bit outside of the box. We get creative with it. You almost lost Dave Burke? Almost. Brought him right back in. Brought him back in. What did you bring him back in with? The...

It was a covert anti-drinking. Oh, that's right. No, put it this way. Discipline instead of beer. How about that? That's more what it is. I like it. It's a good one. Anyway, it's called The Shirt Locker. It's on jockelstore.com, so check that out. Get some. Also primalbeef.com, coloradocraftbeef.com. We need lean sentences.

Yeah, that sound good. We also need steak that tastes good So primal beef calm Colorado craft beef calm steak burgers hot dogs jerky Beef tallow by the way from Colorado craft beef calm just we got what you need So if you need steak you need beef products primal beef calm Colorado craft beef calm awesome people awesome families off awesome companies

Let's go. - You wanna, real quick, a short, easy recipe here. - Mm-hmm, let's go. - Speaking of friction, so primal beef, whichever, get your ground beef, right? Three eggs, so one pound of ground beef, give or take. Three eggs, cage-free, pasture-raised, ideally.

Do you know Famous Dave's Rib Rub? You ever heard of this? No. It's called Famous Dave's Rib Rub. Okay. They put some of that in there. Boom, cook. Cook it all up in a pan. One big basket? One big deal. Yep, one big pan. How much does it taste like eggs? None. None?

I like the... None like eggs. No, I put it this... Yeah, when you hit a chunk of egg, you know, yeah, you know. But it's weird. If you don't smell an egg, an egg doesn't taste like anything. It's the smell of an egg. Like, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like when I'm eating Chinese food and there's some eggs in there, I don't... It doesn't taste at all like eggs. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right or wrong? I guess you're right about that. Yeah, you are now that I think of it. Well, okay. You're damn right.

So my, and with the eggs, this is how I do it. I cook it up first without the eggs. Right at the last minute, I crack the three eggs on top. Kind of like gourmet style. Mix them in. I do not mix them in. I used to mix in a bunch of egg whites. I used to, but it's like, you know, plus I hear the cholesterol from the egg yolks is good for you. Yeah. Good for development in many ways. Anyway, I crack them. I crack them. I don't mix them in. I put the, I turn it off. I put the top, the cap, what do you call it? The cover. Okay.

So the eggs cook like just ever so subtly over the surface. See what I'm saying? Then I make jasmine rice. Okay. Good to go. Mix them all together if you like. But yes, about 80, no, like 100 grams of protein in that one. So that's like a post-workout scenario. Easily digestible carbohydrates. Jasmine rice. Jasmine rice. Yeah.

omega-3 fatty acids right the whole spectrum of nutrients for for gains that's a good answer easy quick good easy recipe right there yeah awesome there you go also subscribe to this podcast also subscribe to jocko underground also the youtube channels psychological warfare written a bunch of books by the way one of them's getting made into a movie or actually like it's kind of the first two that got made into a movie those are wave the warrior kid

One, two, three, four, and five. Mikey and the Dragons. And then a bunch of, you know, speaking of creative process, Final Spin over there. Wrote a little novel activity. So there you go. Bunch of books. Leadership books. The whole nine yards. Also, we have a leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. Go to echelonfront.com for the deets. Did I say the deets? Yes, I did. I'm turning, I'm getting practice in communications. Hell yeah. You know? We got the muster that you can attend that.

The next one is San Antonio, Texas, April 29th through May 1st. We also have the council. We have Battlefield. And then if you want us to come to your company, we will come into your company and we will help you with your leadership. That's echelonfront.com. We also have an online training academy. These leadership principles that we talk about, these are skills. Just like writing is a skill, leadership is a skill.

And you can use this leadership skill just like writing when you're writing a text to your wife or your husband, or you're writing a text or a formal email to your board. Either way, it's the same skill set. Same thing with leadership. You're leading your spouse, you're leading your kids, or you're leading your board members. Use these skills. If you want to learn these skills, go to ExtremeOwnership.com.

And also, if you want to help out service members active and retired, you want to help their families, you want to help Gold Star families, check out Mark Lee's mom. She's got an amazing organization. It's America's Mighty Warriors. And if you want to help them out or you want to donate, go to americasmightywarriors.org. Also, don't forget about heroesandhorses.org up in Montana with Micah Fink. And then finally, Jimmy May's organization, beyondthebrotherhood.org. If you want to connect with us, I'm at jocko.com.

and on social media i'm at jonko willing connect goes out echo charles just don't just don't waste a bunch of time there because you could be writing you could be getting smarter it could be lifting getting stronger could be sprinting getting faster don't let the algorithm make you dumber slower and weaker thanks all the military personnel out there on the front lines protecting us but also in the intellectual zone making sure our troops know

how to lead and read and write and think. So thanks to all those military personnel teaching us how to think. Also thanks to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, as well as all other first responders. Thanks for keeping us safe here on the home front and everyone else out there. Your mind is like your body. You need to learn skills. You need to train it.

You need to exercise it. You need to make your mind strong. You need to make your body strong. You need to make your mind nimble. You need to make your body nimble. You need to train. You need to push. You need to fuel it properly. You need to make your mind better. And one of the best ways to do that is to write. It's also a critical component of leading and of winning. So get out some paper, pick up a pen, go get after it. Until next time, this is Echo and Jocko out.