Quiet Service with General Stan McChrystal

[Music] general stan mcchrystal is known for commanding the special operations forces during the obama years and this is when the special operations forces were working at maximum capacity in iraq and afghanistan it created all kinds of new problems of communication and bureaucracy and one of the many things he's known for is actually helping figure out an entirely new way in which large sprawling organizations can keep everyone in the loop but that's not what i wanted to talk to stan mcchrystal about i wanted to talk to him about what it means to serve quietly in a world in which we feel the need to advertise everything we do on social media stan mcchrystal has led a career that very often is behind the scenes this is a bit of optimism [Music] stan thanks so much for for doing this for sure now you come from a line of soldiers were you pushed to join the army or did you want to join the army where'd the inclination come because you had the choice i assume to go in one direction or another for your career well you're correct my father was a soldier and my father's father was a soldier my four brothers were soldiers my sister married a soldier i married the daughter of a soldier her three brothers are soldiers her sister's the widow of a soldier that i served with so did anybody ever force me no they didn't have to as you got older one i wanted to be my dad because he was my hero but also it's just of course this notion of service how did it show up at home it was really through my mother my father had been in the korean war but i wasn't born then and then when i was 10 the vietnam war started to go and he's got six kids and he deploys to vietnam to command an infantry battalion and my mother this is not easy and we weren't living on a military base there weren't support structures around and we take them to the airport one day in our old station wagon dropped them off and then as we're driving back i realized what my mother had to deal with now and so i watched her kind of quietly just do what it had to do and talk to us and she wasn't a believer in the vietnam war she was very much against it but she loved my father and so for that and then a subsequent tour so the sense that you just bear the burden that is your share the idea that if everybody has to do something you should do yours and just do it quietly stoically might be the right term and my mother embodied that i remember because she went through all of that and then just when my dad made brigadier general and theoretically life would be easy she died at a very young age she just died suddenly it was always sad to me that people don't look harder at that demographic and say what service really is because sometimes it's not in uniform even associated with the military yeah we live in a world where i think this idea of service has either morphed or even i dare i say be forgotten there was a time where service was the norm like chivalry was like the norm and all of the rules that went with chivalry and giving someone your word actually meant something and the stories of world war ii of young men who committed suicide because they weren't drafted where this call to service was the thing and we can discuss the reasons but we can at least say that for some reason this idea of the draw to service and the call to service seems to have declined in this modern day is that a fair assessment i think you're exactly correct that sense of responsibility that i have a number of expectations to live up to has decreased now in some ways you say well everybody's their own person now they analyze everything and decide what to do well the problem is it's hard to run a society like that it's hard to have collective defense it's hard to have collective care for those who can't care for themselves it's hard to have those things which we do better jointly than we do individually it's hard to make that work unless people feel a responsibility for their part of the task well it seems like america has over-indexed on rugged individualism it's an important thing it's a good thing but there's a balance and there's a paradox to being human i think that every single day we're both individuals but we're also members of groups and we have a responsibility to both which is we have to take care of ourselves but we have a responsibility to the group and it's never going to be in perfect balance and it's never going to be even it's the seesaw that we have to play with every day but it should be in play is the point it shouldn't be lopsided to rugged individualism and you can see it in the rise of our industries i think you know there's an entire section in the bookshop called self-help and there's no section in the bookshop called help others so we're all trying to learn how to take care of ourselves but where are we learning to take care of each other which i think is interesting i think that's a great point if you think about that you know if i was to say how do you want young americans wanting to find it just in our country right now how do you want them to process that let's see if they're coming of age coming out of high school what should be in their mind well it doesn't have to be this grand thing it can be as simple as i have a responsibility to the fellow human being to the left and to the right of me and i would sacrifice my interest to make sure that they feel safe psychologically or physically i think that's right that's why i'm so passionate about civilian national service for young americans because i think you can plant a seed through behavior getting them to do something for a year inspiring them yeah exactly they won't like it every day but they will come out of it differently and they'll come out a bit more thoughtful and to be clear when you're talking about national service we're not necessarily talking about military it could be teach for america it could be absolutely anything that is about serving society it's particularly not military because reality is not everybody's right for the military and we don't need that big a military if we started to make military big enough just to give everybody a place that would be a mistake instead health care the environment education there's so much room for people to go in for a year or two give and then when they leave they come out differently themselves they're the real product yeah i think we have to have a constellation of opportunities some very local some national and international young people can go with those and we've got to have it paid because otherwise only families that can support their kid can give the opportunity and we've got to make it full-time it's got to be an immersive experience it can't be two hours every saturday it's gotta disrupt your life a bit the other part is recognizing the value of the experience because people come out more disciplined more experienced and so universities ought to give preferential admission to people who've done service companies need to get preferential hiring doesn't mean that you know you go to the front of the line everywhere but it means you get credit for that it's like coming out you're a veteran of sorts because military and civilian service ought to be two sides of the same coin but at the end of the day you're getting a better human being you're getting a better employee i think a lot of young people there's the sense of impatience you know like i gotta get my career going i love the idea of volunteering for two years or doing something you know teaching in a school somewhere in america or volunteering for healthcare or whatever but i feel like i'm gonna lose two years other people will get ahead of me in this competition if i go do that david marquet does some interesting work where there's this belief to change behavior first you have to change someone's thinking and then they'll change their behavior and we see this in companies you give the powerpoint you explain what we're doing and then you hope people will come along and his work has found that no you force a change in behavior and then people change their thinking so mandating national service people will come along and realize how great it is he's exactly right the other conversation we have to get is the one where someone wants to run for office and so they are bright young and you know charismatic and ambitious and they get in front of a bunch of people and said i want to be your congressman and someone says okay how did you serve and they look down at their shoes and they go well you know i was in this school and then there's law school and i i didn't and they go why are you running for office get out of here i think that would be very powerful i mean it's true when we see this in our politicians right which is this is our complaint about politicians are they there to serve us are they there to win the game and serve themselves i mean where did they come from yeah it also strikes me there's plenty of shared struggle right now in the united states how come we're not coming together the way we should be i mean we seem to be dividing in the struggle rather than coalescing in the struggle and do i have a romantic view of the way it used to be or is there actually something different now i have the same view issue think about it if you had written a movie about what would unite the world what you would do is you'd create an external threat typically martians think of one of those movies where aliens come and the world for the first time in a long time unites and it fights off the aliens and everything's good covert 19's like that it's something everybody could hate nobody's gonna love a virus that kills people and it was a great opportunity to unite us internally and externally you can't blame it on anybody and yet the opposite has happened what we've done is we've gone into smaller entities almost tribally and we've linked arms and we've done that and as a consequence we've done two things one we've been much less effective than we needed to be and second we've missed the opportunity to have a unifying theme that brings us together and absent that it's pretty easy for societies to fragment and that's what i think is so dangerous right now now it's also an opportunity there's a lot of people having the conversation we are right now and so i'm hoping that because that conversation is going on that there are people saying okay what do we have to do this race is the interesting question of sort of to use a modern term to put on it but branding you look at the quote-unquote threats that we face and they've had really bad branding like we call it you know global warming well but we had a really bad winter and i thought you told me it was warming or we call it climate change but people confuse the weather and the climate they're not the same thing and why didn't we call it climate cancer that sounds a lot worse to me we've done a terrible job at communicating this existential threat and so we're not coming together as a people and you know this from military which is there is a sense of branding the enemy to brand the enemy as this disconnected threat that they're no longer human they're they're now a threat and so i wonder if we have a responsibility leaders have responsibility to better communicate the threats that we have rather than explaining them yeah but it seems to me that there's been a failure of communication from our leaders to help us understand the importance of these existential threats that would make us come together as a community yeah i think that's true if you think of the war on poverty that president johnson pushed that was pretty clear you know it was unevenly executed but it's pretty clear and now if we think about the push for equality in our society it's kind of hard to be against philosophically against the fact that everyone should have an equal opportunity yeah but we have not been able to explain that in a way where that's what we're forcing people to yeah to talk about we're talking about other things and what we should be talking about is the idea that every young person gets a roughly equal start roughly equal opportunity in life and that's never going to be perfect but it should be our goal you shouldn't be able to argue against that i think that's such an interesting point which is to raise the conversation we're down in the weeds yeah and there's a bigger idea here and black lives matter has sparked something that is innate in all of us which is we believe in fairness every a little child my little nephew you know something happens and he'll scream out to me that's unfair like it's innate we have a sense of fairness in all of us and the question is how do we advance this sense of to your point everybody gets roughly the same start what you do with your start is is up to you i guess but i don't even know if that's true that's what black lives matter's highlighted which is okay all fine with a good and fair start but it's not a fair ride it's not a fair journey but i do really appreciate this idea of raising the conversation but who it's a great question i mean let's talk health care for example i think the conversation should start with every citizen is going to get health care adequate health care for their whole life and people say well wait a minute are we talking about single-payer obamacare any number of the permutations say no we're not talking about any of that what we're talking about right now is do you agree with the idea that everybody gets health care if they're bleeding they get bandaged if they're sick they get taken care of and all the things you need and people again would go well yeah okay of course they'd be careful because when you get into how you're getting the arguments but if we could get a general agreement that says every american gets health care not just because it's fair but because it's smart for society it makes us a better society then you start to work toward it i think obama made a mistake when he communicated this i've gone back and watched he gave a speech to a joint session of congress one of the first times he was making a national argument for national health care and he made a rational argument you know there were 30 million uninsured americans it was kind of how the speech started which to anybody sounds big and complicated and sounds expensive as opposed to going to the foundations of the united states you know he could have stood up and said our founding fathers founded this nation on three basic principles all men are created equal endowed with unalienable rights amongst which include life liberty in the pursuit of happiness let's just talk about one of those let's just talk about life the united states is the wealthiest nation on earth the united states has the most powerful nation on earth only our president is referred to as the leader of the free world then how is it that america has one of the highest infant mortality rates amongst western nations how is it that we can claim to provide life for all of our citizens and yet we cannot even provide a doctor for every child there are 30 million uninjured americans and i think that again it goes back to a failure of communication he did not tap into a sense of shared something or other that all americans have regardless of color creed and politics he went straight into let me explain something to you and i think this is where our leaders and our politicians have failed us everybody's trying to explain things to us i mean you know this from war history america is losing the psychological and social fight in vietnam and they're having press conferences saying how well they're doing in battle like the numbers don't matter yeah you know we lost 58 000 men they lost 3 million people how did we lose that's right because we kept talking about it rationally it doesn't work and i think there's a complete breakdown in this nation of how we are able to connect with people how we explain things or inspire right and so here's the challenge what should leaders be doing like how the heck are we going to inspire people to want to do something that comes at personal sacrifice yeah i think people want to be inspired the one thing that i think is true is they desperately want to be inspired they're just sort of waiting to be asked yeah i think black lives matter is important on so many levels there's the obvious one that we need to reconcile and hold a mirror up to ourselves as a society and and sort of admit we need to do a lot better but i think it's provided an opportunity for people to show up you know i think people forget that the internet is not what changes society you know mubarak was not overthrown by twitter he was overthrown by the thousands and thousands and thousands of people who showed up in tahir square it requires people to physically show up and it's one of the things i love about this youngest generation gen z is they're not online activists they show up and they organize and they're having strikes from school to make a point and they're building rallies themselves they're an activist generation and maybe this activist generation is in response it is the pendulum to the slacktivism that has preceded them yeah so as i said the black lives matter movement it's been a long time since america's had a movement you know where people came out on the streets and protested in massive massive numbers at personal risk i might add and i agree with you on that completely the one thing if i was advising black lives matter is because i've written and studied the civil rights movement they need to make sure they're not thinking about this like a battle it's a war and so they have got to have enough persistent pressure on the system because we both know our country well enough that there'll be a certain response and then as soon as the pressure goes down there will be stop a progress and in fact there'll be some encroachment back and so they need to understand that martin luther king jr did it for 13 years till he was murdered and then other people led the movement after that it takes constant inexorable pressure well it goes back to our impatience as a society with younger impatient generations i got to get my career started and i got to see change now yeah and some of that's true yeah but as you said societal change sticky societal change right that can survive the machinations of a political cycle takes time can you share a specific story that you went through something we can relive with you where you came out a different version of yourself yeah i was a captain for about seven years so i had about 10 years in the army and the first time in the army when you can be promoted early get an accelerate promotion is to major and so this board was coming up and i was going to be considered along with thousands of other captains and i didn't think much about it you know i didn't really think about getting but i'd had all the right jobs in fact i was already in a majors job and people were telling me how cool i was and how well i was doing and so part of me inside was going ah you know i'm the kind of guy they pick early and outwardly i always discount that well the list came out and my battalion commander called me and he said you're not on the majors list and i said okay i can live with that i was hurt but it wasn't crushing until i saw the list and literally all my friends were on the list or it seemed like it seemed like every other captain that i knew really well was and i was not and so now not being on was really noteworthy and so it crushed me and i remember my wife annie you know been married 43 years now but one of the things she said he goes okay you didn't make it so what what are you going to do you going to get out of the army and i said no and she says well then you got to get over it because if you're not going to get out and i came away with this lifelong thing i repeat to other people i said you know every once in a while if you get selected for promotion you say wow the promotion board is really smart because they picked me and i started reminding myself that later when i got picked for promotions i said the board that picked me was no smarter than the board that didn't and so i need to take any success with the same grain of salt i need to be as dismissive of the process as i was when i didn't get selected it was good to happen so early in my career because it was a real slap back into humility that is so great and i'm realizing just you know when something goes our way we think how smart though people are and how good those people are and when it doesn't go we think what idiots and what poor leaders they are and how they don't understand and it's the same like they're either idiots all the time and they picked you for a promotion because they're idiots or they're smart they know something that you don't know i really like the fact that we treat it equally that's such a good one there's a great story that the chief of staff of the army once told and he said every year they picked 40 colonels in the army to be brigadier generals and that's the most difficult hurdle to get over so it's 2500 get looked at 40 get picks so it's really the eye of a needle a lot of it's luck and he said he was talking to a colonel one day and he said well what do you think about this board coming up he said sir you know every year when the 40 person list comes out there's always one name that everybody looks at and goes how did that idiot get on the list what a joke and he said sir i want to be that guy i love it i love it one of the things that i think most people misunderstand and misperceive about the military is you know sure there's a lot of testosterone and it's a machismo culture but the intensity of humanity that exists there's hand-holding there's hugging there's crying and crying in the military is fine is there someone you think of a fallen comrade or a story that you grew up with that you can't get through the story is there something that has stuck with you that has become a part of who you are as stan mcchrystal this story this person in your life has now become a part of your the very way you show up in the world because you knew them or because of the story you lived through there is um christmas eve it's tradition for commanders to fly around and visit remote bases christmas eve christmas day so i was doing the christmas eve part and then christmas day would do more so it was already dark and it was afghanistan and i'm landing at these little bases and i landed at a small little base it looked like a beaujesque for you know the afghanistan thing and there's probably 40 50 americans stationed there and and 70 radio afghan forces and together they're to secure this local area and so we land outside and we walk into the uh perimeter and we go into the mess hall and they've gathered most of the people there my sergeant major and i and two or three others and we talk for a few minutes and everybody is it's always the same they're pretty tight at first and then you know you you talk informally and then the great icebreakers just say does anybody want to take any pictures or do anything and then they all want to take pictures together and that breaks it down it's great and so as i'm given my comments i see a young private first class and i see the name and literally i just froze because the name was langmack and it was a very distinct name and there had been a ranger sergeant first class that i had served with in the range regiment when i commanded the regiment and then he had gone off to delta force become an operator and then in 2005 under my command he was killed i knew steve langmack and his wife quite well and i'm sitting there and i'm looking at this guy at this name tag distracted by my comments and we went to the pictures i went over to him and i said was your father in the service and he could figure out where i was going with this right away and he goes yes sir i said was your father a ranger he says yes sir and in that moment what i realized is we're seeing this generational service his father had been killed this kid didn't have to go in the military he could have gone and done anything but not only gone in the military here he was in this godforsaken part of afghanistan on christmas his mom is now home alone you know she'd been widowed at that point for four and a half years and i just realized that he didn't come and tell me hey you knew my dad he wasn't gonna do that and i just happened to see it and it reminded me what sort of quiet service is what sacrifice what his father had done what his mother was doing and then what he was and so it's one of those things that whenever i think about that when people talk about okay you know i'm doing my part i said okay i'm sure you are but i put it against that yardstick a lot of the stories you tell are of quiet service you tell the story of this young man this quiet service you tell the story of your mother of quiet service you distinctly pointed out the quietness of her service you talk about humility a lot of the stories you tell are about quiet and about being humble it's a theme in your work it's a theme in the stories and maybe that's what this is all about which is maybe the reason we've lost the sense of sacrifice is because we're all too busy advertising ourselves yeah maybe this has nothing to do with service maybe the lack of service is a symptom that we've lost our humility as individuals as a nation you know i see that in the resume building in young people where there's more resume than substance and they've been encouraged to do that i think we've got a celebrity culture where we can confuse celebrity with competence or leadership so i think you're probably right what i think is so funny about america we celebrate our independence on july 4th 1776. but we fought the revolutionary war until the treaty of paris on september 3rd 1783 we actually aren't celebrating our independence we're celebrating the day we declared our independence independence didn't come for another seven years before the united states was formally recognized as independent nation but that's a very american thing yeah the declaration is enough and i think that again there's huge positives in that you know europe makes fun of us because we're so optimistic as a nation but i think the downside of that is we're sometimes so busy broadcasting that we're not spending enough time listening we're so busy self-promoting that sometimes we're forgetting the substance and maybe this is just a point in time an inflection point a necessary point for correction and sometimes maybe black lives matter it's that smack across the face that says you know maybe you should maybe should be a little more quiet and a little more humble like you didn't get everything right america yeah you got some things wrong it's okay you just got to take account you got to make corrections and you got to you got to learn your lesson you got to learn that humility i think there's something really powerful about quiet service and for somebody like you with a storied career you could tell me any story you wanted you could have told me a story of heroism and machismo and somebody running to battle and the story you chose to tell me that you carry with you as someone you want to be like is this private first class with quiet service maybe we all need to just like do that go serve as opposed to broadcasting what we served or intended to do yeah stan i can't thank you enough and i'm i'm not going to go into it people can do their own research on your career but knowing how the circumstances under which you left the army you are that private first class it was quiet and you allowed history to tell the right story and to get the truth out later on i have great respect for just how quiet you are and just put your head down and get the job done it's such a such an honor thanks for all you do and thanks for having me today but even more thanks for all you do you make people think sometimes that makes their heads hurt but you make me think that's one of the biggest contributions you can make thank you sir i appreciate it take care son [Music] if you enjoyed this podcast and if you'd like to hear more please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts until then take care of yourself take care of each other

Channel: Simon Sinek

Views: 10,696

Rating: 4.8505745 out of 5

Keywords: simon sinek, start with why, inspiration, motivation, leadership, career, inspire

Id: vguQz6qDe2E

Length: 28min 15sec (1695 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020