Radical Gratitude

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Jocko Willink, the author, podcaster and retired navy seal, has a tenet he constantly reiterates in relation to leadership. That of “radical responsibility”. Essentially, this boils down to, if you are in a leadership position, and someone below you fucks up, its also your fuck up.

No matter what the situation is, when one of your subordinates does something that creates problems, rather than immediately looking at what they did wrong and distancing yourself from their failure, you have to look at yourself and see how you may have contributed to this failure.

Then when addressing it with them, you can address how you fell short and you act to resolve the failure as allies, rather than in a distorted power dynamic.

Now there may become times when the person under you is simply fucking up over and over and there is nothing further you can do.

But at that point, you can recognize that maybe you selected the wrong person for your team. At the end of the day, if you are a leader, it all comes back to you, and you have to own it, radically.

I love this philosophy because it removes any sort of victim mentality from the proceedings. It's the hallmark of leadership to own a situation as your own.

I’ve applied this quality to a different virtue that everyone, in a leadership position or not, can use. And I call it radical gratitude.

Radical gratitude is the idea that no matter what happens in your life, it is always in service of your highest good. The key lies in the subtle difference between obstacles and re-directions.

Obstacles are put in your path so you can level up and push through them. Like riding a bike, you have to maintain balance and push through the resistance to get where you’re going. You can go as slow as you want, but you always have to be moving forward to stay up.

Re-directions are when the universe guides you away from what is not your path. It could be gentle, like putting a new tempting opportunity in your path that is meant to guide you toward the things you truly want, like a job or new relationship. Or it could be little technical glitches or “bad luck.”

God, the Universe, Divinity, whatever you want to call it, will never allow you to miss out on an opportunity that is meant for you. He will guide you toward that opportunity, and away from the things that are not in service of your highest good.

The problem is, our ego often forms attachments to things that are not in service of our highest good, so when we get a redirection, it can feel like the universe is sabotaging us. That whenever something good comes into our lives it is taken away from us.

And the more we cling to our attachments, the louder the universe becomes. This has never been more clear to me than when I was living a hedonistic lifestyle in Los Angeles and was on cloud nine, only to have it all come crashing down because I thought I was going to have a life altering medical diagnosis.

After leaving L.A. and spending three months in and out of doctors offices, it turned out to be nothing but chronic stress and burnout. I had had so much adrenaline and cortisol coursing through my veins, my body finally said enough is enough you need to be depressed for a while while we sort out your central nervous system.

And it was all in service of my highest good because a year later, Russia invaded Ukraine and gas went to $7.00 a gallon in LA and it allowed me the time and bandwidth to reconnect with the passions and people I wanted in my life.

And I realized that the more you attach yourself to outcomes, the more you set yourself up for failure. Siddhartha Gautama did all the work for us centuries ago. “All suffering comes from attachment”. So the key is to look deep within yourself, look at the things you really want, the things you really value, and go for them 100%.

And if they pan out, great, if they don’t, accept it with grace and have the radical gratitude to realize that nothing is wasted. It’s all leading to your highest good, and all you have to do is keep the faith and keep moving forward.

The key to all this is you can’t allow the setbacks disguised as failure to stop you, deter you or allow them to take up space in your life. You can’t allow them to pull you away from the healthy habits you have created. And most of all, you can’t allow them to stop you.

A quote often attributed to Winston Churchill, which is one of my favorites, goes something like this. “A successful man is one who goes from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

You see, everyone keeps going when they’re winning. It’s easy. Even losers keep going when they’re winning. But it’s only when you have a setback that you separate the wheat from the chaff, the boys from the men, insert any further banal idiom you want.

And the key to going from setback to setback with no loss of enthusiasm is radical gratitude. The knowledge that each set back, each heartbreak, each disappointment, will try to disguise itself as failure, but it’s all a lie.

All of it is testing and preparing you for your throne and what you are truly meant for. How sad would it be if you got everything you ever wanted at 22 and didn’t have to work for anything else in your life ever again?

All you have to do is look at the life of J. Paul Getty, founder of the Getty Oil Company, to know the answer. At the age of 22, on his first oil derrick near Haskell Oklahoma, he struck a major producer which would go on to make him a millionaire. And I don’t mean a 2022 millionaire. I mean a 1944 millionaire.

Getty retired at the age of 23 and spent a year living a life of debauchery in LA. And then what did he do? He went back to work. He tackled larger challenges. He created an empire. Collected art. Married and divorced 5 times.

I’m not suggesting that your goals even have to be this lofty. Having a flexible life with a loving family can be more than enough. What I am saying is the obstacles you encounter along your path aren’t holding you back from everything you want in life. They are your life. They are the key to a meaningful and fulfilling life.

If life was all easy street, if you met your soulmate at 18, if you invested in the next Microsoft at 23, if you inherited millions of dollars from a deceased relative you knew nothing about, life would get easier, but it would lose its meaning real quick unless you took on new challenges and new passions.

Often times when things are too easy, we create problems or problems have a habit of creating themselves. We develop addictions, our partner begins to stray, our children have no work ethic. Because we have nothing to strive for we become valueless.

I leave you with a quote by Theodore Roosevelt:

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

By accepting that everything that is happening is guiding you toward those things, you too can build whatever it is you want to achieve. Be it a company, a family, or a villa full of art on the Malibu coast.