Episode 8 – Admiral William McRaven talks purpose, failure and trust

[0:00:00 Speaker 1] This’ll is Policy on Purpose, a podcast produced by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin Way take you behind the scenes of policy with the people who help shape it For more. Visit LBJ dot utexas Study Teoh,

[0:00:20 Speaker 3] this is Angela Evans. I’m the dean of the LBJ School, and I’m really happy to welcome you to our eighth podcast. And I’m very pleased to have with me every McRaven and I am a

[0:00:30 Speaker 2] cave in his Justin crop was looking up. You know, the rank of the admiral four star general,

[0:00:34 Speaker 3] and there’s only a little over 200

[0:00:37 Speaker 2] in the history of the United States. So this is not only this is a great achievement, but this is a great honor for me. And then I was also thinking about another person who was in the Navy. So the Navy grows these really incredible people. Senator McCain and I had the pleasure of working with him, and he was a patriot and very much of a maverick and an independent thinker. And then now we have you here, and we have the pleasure of having you here at the LBJ School were so, so pleased about that.

[0:01:03 Speaker 0] Well, thanks, I will tell you. Just to be mentioned in the same sentence is as John McCain’s an honor. I also had an opportunity to work with him quite a bit when I was about three star and four star. Just, you know, the finest example of American and American patriot, an American hero. All the right words, frankly applied to John McCain. Also great sense of humor on and quite a character. And and, of course, as with all naval officers and senior officers who had a special bond. And and there’s not a single person I know in the service that didn’t respect him greatly. Yes, So Wave lost a true American hero,

[0:01:37 Speaker 2] and he’s left just an incredible legacy, which is really a wonderful thing. There’s so many of your achievements, but I decided today, really it would focus on some of the achievements. You have an education and in policy.

[0:01:50 Speaker 3] So I just want to say a few things. I don’t know if people notice no, this you created and launched the Special Operations Low intensity conflict curriculum, a curriculum. When you were a student at the naval Ah, postgraduate school, and that’s still used today. So that’s one thing you authored a book on special operations, and you highlighted

[0:02:10 Speaker 2] the principles needed for successful military operations. So here’s another way to impart your knowledge

[0:02:16 Speaker 3] that I don’t know. People know about

[0:02:17 Speaker 5] that

[0:02:18 Speaker 3] you’re recognized authority in U. S. Foreign policy and an adviser to presidents and world leaders

[0:02:25 Speaker 2] and this foreign process. People seem sort of in these military kinds of hits, but the foreign policy is so

[0:02:30 Speaker 4] important to be a really good military leader as

[0:02:33 Speaker 3] well. In 2012 Foreign policy magazine named you one of the top 10 foreign policy experts in one of the top 100 global thinkers. And then you served as a chancellor of the University of

[0:02:47 Speaker 2] Texas system. And now we have you here at the LBJ

[0:02:50 Speaker 3] School is a professor. So it’s really clear

[0:02:52 Speaker 2] that you’ve devoted a lot of your life to educational pursuits but also being in the policy arena. And that’s really important a combination

[0:03:00 Speaker 4] for me today.

[0:03:01 Speaker 3] So since their podcast is called policy on purpose, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is throughout your life, you have found purpose and you’ve been directed by its I have three questions around purpose. One as can you tell us the importance of finding purpose in life. And you can Can you describe challenges that you faced when that purpose was challenged? And also, how do you think we can best prepare those in policy education to determine their purpose

[0:03:30 Speaker 2] into standby it through the contents? So it’s really ah, purpose question for set of questions.

[0:03:36 Speaker 0] Well, I mean, I think everybody needs a purpose in life. I think what surprises a lot of people is they start off with one purpose thinking This is the path that life is going to take them down and then opportunities present themselves. The life changes, and the next thing you know, they’re on different path. In my case, I had frankly, I had wanted to be a track coach at one point in time when my grades were, shall we say, having some difficulties at the University of Texas. But but also I wanted to be a marine biologist. I growing up as a kid I love Jack Cristo. I love the idea of being on the C. I love the idea of diving. I started scuba diving when I was 13 years old in Canyon Lake and then out on the Gulf Coast. And so I thought I wanted to be a marine biologist. Well, I got the the water part, right. But at some point in time, things around me began to change, and I decided I wanted to be a Navy SEAL. And this idea of having a purpose to be a Navy seal really kind of set me on the path to make sure I was physically in shape, that I understood everything about demolitions and weapons and the sort of things you need to be able to get through seal training. And then once I got through shell training, I will, you know. And this may not be the right lesson for every one of your listeners. I don’t know that my event horizon was too far. I wasn’t looking at being a Navy seal admiral. In fact, at the time when I came into the seals in 1977 there were no seal admirals. So all I really wanted to do was to be a SEAL platoon commander, and a platoon is really the that kind of smallest combat element of Ah seal team. And this was where you did most of your your training. This is where you had your best leadership opportunities at the time I was going through s so that became my purpose. And it drove me for several years to be the very best I could what I was doing. So you have to be good at what you’re doing if you want to continue to progress, and I think that will help drive the purpose. I think today what I’ve seen, certainly with some of my Children, but with other students I’ve met is they look way down the road and they want to kind of figure out how life is going to or how they’re going to shape their life to be something 20 years from now. I can almost guarantee them that whatever they plan to be 20 years from now, they will probably be something else. So, you know, you really have to kind of look at, I think, a shorter event horizon. Figure out what your purpose is in that short of in horizon and then drive hard towards that purpose.

[0:06:07 Speaker 3] So one of the

[0:06:08 Speaker 2] things that we talk about here is people getting off track. So there is a there is a need to have a trajectory and a purpose. And then sometimes people think like, well, it’s not a choice of that. I’m gonna do a new career. The the trajectory em on, I got challenges. So

[0:06:25 Speaker 3] how do you meet

[0:06:26 Speaker 2] those shown? Just so in your case, some of these could have been physical challenges or psychological challenges or competitive challenges or something. But you know, the drive to stay on purpose. So

[0:06:36 Speaker 3] can you talk to us a little

[0:06:37 Speaker 2] bit about happiness?

[0:06:38 Speaker 0] So the a zai mentioned I always wanted to be initially a SEAL platoon commander, But early on in my career, I was given this great opportunity to go be a leader in a very elite seal team. Well, I got fired from this particular sealed.

[0:06:54 Speaker 2] You did.

[0:06:55 Speaker 0] I did

[0:06:55 Speaker 2] There. You

[0:06:56 Speaker 0] did not go well. Ah, and the commanding officer relieved me of my ing shell squadron teams. We called him back, then relieved me of that position, and I was sent to another command. Well, that’s about as bad as it gets, So it’s never good to get fired. It’s perfectly bad to be fired in the Navy. But at that point in time, I had to say, OK, uh is my purpose still something I think is important. And frankly, it helped My wife, you know, kind of picked me up, dusted me off and said, Look, you’ve never quit it. Anything in your life Now is not the time to quit. If you feel strongly about continuing than we need to get over this hurdle and press forward and we did, you know, I rebounded in my next job, I rebuilt my reputation And as time went on and it did take some time I mean again, any time you go through something as dramatic and is almost personally embarrassing is that is it takes a while to rebuild your confidence and to put you on the right path. Sometimes that takes people around you to help you do that exactly. And so but it also back to your point about purpose. It also kind of forces you to make sure that your purpose you have to evaluate your purpose was my purpose in life really something that overcoming this challenge was gonna be worthwhile to achieve that purpose and my answer was yes, on and so, having that purpose, having the challenge that I was facing, figuring out how to overcome that challenge was important. But at the end of the day, it was about making sure the purpose was right and it was worth all the hard work that was gonna be put into it toe to achieve it.

[0:08:29 Speaker 2] I think this is an important discussion because a lot of our students think about a failure as something that they can’t get up from it or are. They take it too personally and they don’t think about the ultimate goal. You know, in part of I worry about a little bit about people being too thin skinned and, you know, getting off track. So this is a really important statement you made and also heavy support structures around. So if it’s not your spouse or, you know, a family member or a friend or a community that can help you really figure it out, you have to think it through. So this is thank you for that from that story.

[0:09:03 Speaker 3] The other thing I want to talk

[0:09:04 Speaker 2] about with you is that some of the challenges. We face it a policy school in particular where we have two years with students, sometimes three if they’re taking a dual degree of their studying. Another discipline is that we get were very, very technically oriented. We wanted to have technical information. Oftentimes it’s very precise in his very disciplined, specific. And so you and I have had discussions outside of this, about

[0:09:27 Speaker 3] how we start teaching students larger

[0:09:30 Speaker 4] frameworks of the way to think about things.

[0:09:33 Speaker 3] How do you think

[0:09:34 Speaker 2] and act in a strategic way? Or I like this new word of a principled way. You know, you’ve got some kind of a framework to think about this, and I think we owe that especially to our students who are in policy. We have to bring a lot of disciplines together

[0:09:47 Speaker 3] to attack a problem. So when we’re thinking about, they had talked to me

[0:09:51 Speaker 2] a little bit about how you think in a strategic way, in terms of the principles you set up that your actions have to, or actions of those that you lied have to fill, fulfill those principles,

[0:10:02 Speaker 3] and then how you use

[0:10:04 Speaker 2] information, especially if you don’t have the best information that you need And then how you delegate in how you collaborate, cause we when we’re talking about this, this is a lot of what we’re trying to bring to the students in terms of those frameworks.

[0:10:19 Speaker 0] Let me. I’m gonna break it down here onto a couple of different categories. So let’s talk a little bit about kind of the education of a student who is, ah, who’s trying to develop a public policy or national security background and be a player in that arena. I think you have to have some fundamental pieces that are going to make you viable, were of you. Go one. You have to have good writing skills, Interestingly enough, coming up in the elevator to meet with you. A few minutes ago, I heard some students in the elevator talking about the critical right or the writing class they were taking and and how challenging it. Waas Good on it. I mean, you have to have a challenge. Your writing course. You have to be able to convey your ideas and your thoughts. You have to able to do so clearly. Succinctly so. Writing, I think, is a fundamental piece of whatever you decide to dio, People often laugh about the fact that I was a journalism major here at the University of Texas, and they say, Well, obviously, that didn’t help you much in the military at night sail contraire. The fact matter is, it was essential to my ability to write briefs, which you do in the military. Just about every day you have to craft briefs. You have to write point papers. You have to get your your plan across your message across your position across. So I think writing is fundamental. Critical thinking is the other aspect of again. I think any discipline you go into, you have to be able to think critically. I’m not sure a lot of people understand what that means, but it really is this idea that we’ve got to be able to look at the information and not just take it, you know, based on the facts. But look at things interdisciplinary, be able to apply those to a particular problem set and then come up with, you know, a number of solutions, not just one solution, cause there’s invariably a couple of solutions to a problem set. But this idea to be able to think critically. I think it’s also important. So writing skills, briefing skills, critical thinking skills, I think those are fundamental to whatever you are going to dio now is your You begin to move forward. Let’s take it on the military side for me again. It gets back to your baseline. Skill set has got to be very good. So if you’re a Navy SEAL, then you need to know how to shoot your weapons, right? You need to understand demolition. You need to be able to jump out of an airplane. You gotta be able lock out of submarines. You have to be good at all of the critical skill sets in again in your career field. Then, from there you can begin to build upon that and go from Well, I have my tactical skills. As we say Now I need to have my operational skills and how this becomes planning at an operational level. And then as you get more senior, you develop strategic skills looking more broadly across not only the military, but we like to talk about, you know, dime your diplomatic, your information, your military and your economic. So when the military looks at a problem set. When military planners look a problem, said they apply these this framework of dime to everything. Certainly, senior officers dio, because when you’re in Iraq and Afghanistan, you absolutely know, for example, that the problems you’re dealing with their the military piece of this is a small piece. So as we were beginning to work with the village elders in Afghanistan, you would ask yourself a number of things. So clearly there was a security component of it that was kind of a military component of it. But what was the economic component? How are we going to incentivize the elders, not Teoh, affiliate themselves with the Taliban? Will you incentivize them through, making sure that you provide them? Resource is toe, have school houses toe, have clean water. You also have to look at the diplomatic piece as you’re dealing with again the provincial leaders and the district leaders and then the information piece, always about understanding what’s happening around you. So this this gets back to you have to have the fundamentals. But then the more senior you get, you’ve got to be able to broaden your horizon in terms of understanding Ah, a whole lot of problems sets around you when you mentioned earlier on in the podcast that ah, you know, somebody had given me the moniker of the top 10 national security experts. And I will tell you, I don’t think that’s unusual for senior military officials, because as a senior officer, you are dealing with heads of state. So I routinely dealt with, you know, the king of Jordan and the prime minister of Iraq and the prime minister of Afghanistan. And you know, this is the sort of things that you deal with as a senior officer in the military, and you begin to understand and develop a better framework and principles for dealing with national security. So not unusual at all in terms of the principles for moving forward. Um, again, I would say, if you take the military context of you have to have the basic skill set. So if you’re in public policy, understand the fundamentals of public policy, understand it at the city level, the state level, you know, and the national level understand that Well, get your discipline to the point where you are an expert in your field and then begin to take that and become a little bit more of a generalised at the operational level. In the strategic level,

[0:15:26 Speaker 2] I think these air really important points because one of the things the first thing you talked about was writing, because not only is it a communication skill, it’s a critical thinking skill, because if you can write well, you know that someone’s thinking logically. Also, it’s a way to communicate in a very efficient and effective way. And so we spent a lot of time on writing and our students in policy writing brief writing where you know where they’re very used to undergrad writing large research papers will thoughts of footnotes, lots of passive voice, complex compound sentences and so retraining people to be very direct. That’s important and critical thinking the way you defined it. The challenge for us is how do you see that in a lot of the different courses, so that over so over the whole curriculum, and over the two years they’re here, you’re giving that to them in a lot of different ways, and I think you’ve hit on it and what I really like about it’s aligning toe where we’re going is that? Give them the extra basic skills and make sure they leave here understanding analytics and policy analysis and and, you know, metadata and and how to design a research and looking at the methodologies. But then where do you take? You have to start taking it up a notch. We give him a tool kit, but they have to be able to take their toolkit and apply it in different settings. And those studies come with experience. So another thing we talked about a little bit before we had the podcast is how the students take the advantage off opportunities that come their way and take the risk to say I’m on this, um, on this trajectory and people are telling,

[0:16:51 Speaker 3] Well, maybe you shouldn’t

[0:16:52 Speaker 2] do that. But deep down, you say, maybe I should so talk a little bit about the risk taking in the courage to step out of the lane that people expect you to be in to do something a little bit different.

[0:17:03 Speaker 0] Bob Gates, the former secretary defense, former director of CIA. You’re still this great story about when he was a young CIA officer. At one point in time, the opportunity came up for him to go to the White House. The White House has got a small two or three folks at work intelligence for the CIA in the White House. But his senior officers the time told him that is a career killer. If you go do that, you will never be able to come back to Langley. You will never be an effective CIA officer. You’re gonna be heading down the political path. But Gates said he was interested in doing that. He thought the risk was worthwhile. And of course, the punch line of the story is he comes back later on to be the director of CIA, And the message there for college students were graduates for people in life is that there are going to be opportunities that will will come up, and it is always risk. It is. It is easier to stay on the path, the known path and the safe path. I would encourage people when they see those opportunities. It can be risky, no question about it. But sometimes those risks the return on the investment, those risks is well worth it. We were talking before the podcast, and I have the great advantage when I became a seal of, you know, not necessarily worrying about my future. There were no seal admiral. So when I came in, I had no expectations of being a seal admiral. I had the expectation again, being this seal platoon commander a fairly low level position. But I’m a risk taker. I like to take risks. I like to take professional risks and personal risk. They

[0:18:36 Speaker 3] didn’t always work out

[0:18:38 Speaker 0] to my point about getting fired. That was a risk. I had a lot of people tell me, Don’t go do that. And I went I wouldn’t did it on by failed and ah eso you move back quickly and now you have to reassess. But

[0:18:52 Speaker 3] failure is part of

[0:18:53 Speaker 0] life. And I will tell you that was probably the best experience I had. Even though I failed because one I had toe reassess my my own. As I said my confidence. And did I have the right purpose? But also nothing steals you for combat and for difficult times quite like failure. Andi, I failed a lot in my career, and I assumed a lot of risks that didn’t always turn out right. But in the end. The risks far outweighed the you know, the failures in terms of the trajectory of my career. So I would encourage young students and older students that to accept those risks, try them more times than not. They will work in your favor because other people will look those risks and not be the people that want toe move in that direction. And that direction could be the exact direction that will take you to where you want to go.

[0:19:42 Speaker 2] I think one of the things, too, about taking a risk and failing, is that it helps you learn your about yourself in terms of what you don’t want to do. But it also helps you have humility because I think a lot of folks don’t have that humility factor and what they do and people can’t really relate. In my opinion, people can’t really relate to a person, doesn’t have humility. It just means that it does. And I think it’s a very important one for that reason to. It just helps you think like wait a minute, I’m not such a hot shot, you know, like I could make mistakes and I’ve got to start thinking about how we take those mistakes in and not make them again. But also like I’m not, you know, the king of the hill all the time with the queen of the hill.

[0:20:23 Speaker 0] Nothing could help me with a Zai became a more senior officer, and I saw some of my young officers struggle and fail my ability to go and talk to them and say, I’ve been in your shoes. I was fired and they were like, Wait, you’re the boss. What? You mean you were fired when I was your age? I was fired. You now have to decide whether or not you think moving forward is worth it. But my ability to empathize with them as a result of my experience was incredibly helpful to me again as I became a senior officer.

[0:20:55 Speaker 4] This is great.

[0:20:57 Speaker 3] So we get this kind of moves

[0:20:59 Speaker 2] me in the direction of, you know, after you have all of these experiences, you’ve met a lot of people. You’ve been tested, you’ve tested other people, you get to relationships right this because life gets down to relationships.

[0:21:10 Speaker 3] So one of things

[0:21:11 Speaker 2] I want to talk to you about his

[0:21:12 Speaker 3] trust. When you think about trust. First of all, how important is trust to you? And when trust is damaged, How do you repair that? Or do you? When do you

[0:21:25 Speaker 2] decide it’s worth to repair? And when you decide, maybe this is not This is too much. So we think about this rupture and trust. And a lot of people are experiencing that now. And we’ll experience this sort of a human experience. What do you do about that?

[0:21:41 Speaker 0] Well, trust is critical. I think in everything you do. Um, it was a great book by Steven Covey called The Speed of Trust. And and I had all of my senior officers read it because it was it was an important understanding of how trust works in business how trust works in relationships. But you know, you can’t move forward in an important mission or with an important goal unless you have the trust of the people around you unless you engender trust. And hopefully the people around you are trustworthy. But I have had a number of times when the people that I trusted failed uphold their into the bargain. What I will tell you as I always try to rebuild that trust, even if I have to be the person that goes furthest out to do that. Because, frankly, I’ve been on the other side of it. I recall one time in my life when I think I was the person that was not trustworthy and it was a momentary lapse with a colleague of mine, and I regretted it forever. But it also gave me a perspective. He lost trust in me as a result of ah of an event. And I thought, Well, I I understand things now And I’m you know, I like to think I’m a good person, but even good people, you know will make that mistake Every once in a while we rebuilt the trust and we continued on to do great things together. But that also, um, kind of had me reflect on the people that made mistakes when I trusted them. Most people that make those mistakes, they’re good people and they just make mistakes. Not all of them, but most of them are. So I think it is important. Teoh, go out of your way. Even when somebody fails toe be trustworthy. You try to rebuild that trust and you try to rebuild it as many times as you can on got probably surprises people, you know, at what point in time you just say you are no longer trustworthy. That will be, You know,

[0:23:42 Speaker 2] it’s almost like an individual situation.

[0:23:45 Speaker 0] Certainly some people, you know, you know, if they’ve been good friends for a long time and they have, you know, slip up well, then you give him a break and you move past it. If there’s somebody that has this historical track record of being untrustworthy, well, then you know you trust, but verify.

[0:24:01 Speaker 2] No. And I think that’s an important thing, because I think there’s a lesson in that as well, because sometimes you may have a perception off why a person did something that then

[0:24:11 Speaker 4] ended up to. Do you think this person is untrustworthy,

[0:24:13 Speaker 2] but they have a whole different interpretation of it because, you know, sometimes you can’t be inside of people’s heads. So

[0:24:19 Speaker 0] I think again that this was the case with with me was I thought I was doing the right thing in his eyes. I wasn’t and when I was able to look at it from his perspective and realized why he wasn’t trusting me. It made perfect sense. And sometimes I think, you know, in dealing with people, um, you like to think everybody’s gonna be up front, but sometimes their motivations are different. You have to understand what those motivations are.

[0:24:45 Speaker 2] Yes, well, this has been wonderful to have you here, and it’s gonna be wonderful to heavy here with the students for the simple reasons that everyone who’s listening to this can understand. Because while we can make people experts in a discipline and knowledge based, there’s a whole set of human relationships human interactions, self discovery, courage that you have to have an at for our students who are going into the policy arena. We like to talk about it in the arena, sort of like Teddy Roosevelt talked about. I looked at up, actually, and Teddy Roosevelt did a speech at the Sorbonne. He wrote it himself. It’s like 16 pages, and there’s one paragraph that talks about the arena but basically says, You know, if you’re not in there, if you don’t take that step and leap and you don’t get bloodied, then you have no right to talk to other people about taking and taking and stuff. So we

[0:25:35 Speaker 0] got the critical accounts

[0:25:36 Speaker 2] is exactly is the 60 exactly right? So thank you so much McRaven for being with us today. And I’m so looking forward to having you as part of our community.

[0:25:45 Speaker 0] It’s a great great to be here, and I’m looking forward to being part of the project. Thanks.

[0:25:49 Speaker 1] Thank you. This is policy on Purpose, a podcast produced by the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Way Take you behind the scenes of policy with the people who help shape it. To learn more, visit LBJ dot utexas dot eu and follow us on Twitter or Facebook at the LBJ School. Thank you for listening