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Best Speech in time @ US Navy Admiral William H. McRaven and Steve Jobs
U.S. Navy Admiral William H. McRaven, one of America’s most decorated commanders, delivers one of the best motivational speeches you’ll ever hear.
What starts here changes the world. I have a few suggestions that might help you on your way to a better world. And while these lessons were learned during my time in the military, I can assure you that it matters not whether you ever served a day in uniform.
It matters not your gender, your ethnic or religious background, your orientation, or your social status. Our struggles in this world are similar, and the lessons to overcome those struggles and to move forward, changing ourselves and changing the world around us will apply equally to all. So here are the 10 lessons I learned from basic SEAL training that hopefully will be of value to you as you move forward in life.
Every morning in SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room, and the first thing they’d do is inspect my bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers would be pulled tight, the pillow centered just under the headboard, and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack. It was a simple task, mundane at best, but every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection.
It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors, tough battle-hardened SEALs. But the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day.
It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter.
If you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made. That you made.
And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better. So if you want to change the world, start off by making your bed. During SEAL training, the students are all broken down in a boat cruise.
Each crew is seven students, three on each side of a small rubber boat, and one coxswain to help guide the dinghy. Every day your boat crew forms up on the beach and is instructed to get through the surf zone and paddle several miles down the coast. In the winter, the surf off San Diego can get to be eight to ten feet high, and it is exceedingly difficult to paddle through the plunging surf unless everyone digs in.
Every paddle must be synchronized to the stroke count of the coxswain. Everyone must exert equal effort or the boat will turn against the wave and be unceremoniously dumped back on the beach. For the boat to make it to its destination, everyone must paddle.
You can’t change the world alone. You will need some help. And to truly get from your starting point to your destination takes friends, colleagues, the goodwill of strangers, and a strong coxswain to guide you.
If you want to change the world, find someone to help you paddle. Over a few weeks of difficult training, my SEAL class, which started with 150 men, was down to just 42. There were now six boat crews of seven men each.
I was in the boat with the tall guys, but the best boat crew we had was made up of little guys, the Munchkin crew, we called them. No one was over five foot five. The Munchkin boat crew had one American Indian, one African-American, one Polish-American, one Greek-American, one Italian-American, and two tough kids from the Midwest.
They out-paddled, out-ran, and out-swam all the other boat crews. The big men in the other boat crews would always make good-natured fun of the tiny little flippers the Munchkins put on their tiny little feet prior to every swim. But somehow these little guys from every corner of the nation and the world always had the last laugh, swimming faster than everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us.
SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed, not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education, not your social status. If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not by the size of their flippers.
Several times a week, the instructors would line up the class and do a uniform inspection. It was exceptionally thorough. Your hat had to be perfectly starched, your uniform immaculately pressed, your belt buckle shiny and void of any smudges.
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But it seemed that no matter how much effort you put into starching your hat or pressing your uniform or polishing your belt buckle, it just wasn’t good enough. The instructors would find something wrong. For failing uniform inspection, the student had to run fully clothed into the surf zone, then wet from head to toe, roll around on the beach until every part of your body was covered with sand.
The effect was known as sugar cookie. You stayed in the uniform the rest of the day, cold, wet, and sandy. There were many a student who just couldn’t accept the fact that all their efforts were in vain, that no matter how hard they tried to get the uniform right, it went unappreciated.
Those students didn’t make it through training. Those students didn’t understand the purpose of the drill. You were never going to succeed.
You were never going to have a perfect uniform. The instructors weren’t going to allow it. Sometimes no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform, you still end up as a sugar cookie.
It’s just the way life is sometimes. If you want to change the world, get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward. Every day during training, you were challenged with multiple physical events, long runs, long swims, obstacle courses, hours of calisthenics, something designed to test your mettle.
Every event had standards, times you had to meet. If you failed to meet those times, those standards, your name was posted on a list. And at the end of the day, those on the list were invited to a circus.
A circus was two hours of additional calisthenics designed to wear you down, to break your spirit, to force you to quit. No one wanted a circus. A circus meant that for that day, you didn’t measure up.
A circus meant more fatigue and more fatigue meant that the following day would be more difficult and more circuses were likely. But at some time during SEAL training, everyone, everyone made the circus list. But an interesting thing happened to those who were constantly on the list.
Over time, those students who did two hours of extra calisthenics got stronger and stronger. The pain of the circuses built inner strength and physical resiliency. Life is filled with circuses.
You will fail. You will likely fail often. It will be painful.
It will be discouraging. At times, it will test you to your very core. But if you don’t, if you want to change the world, don’t be afraid of the circuses.
At least twice a week, the trainees were required to run the obstacle course. The obstacle course contained 25 obstacles, including a 10-foot wall, a 30-foot cargo net, a barbed wire crawl, to name a few. But the most challenging obstacle was the slide for life.
It had a three-level 30-foot tower at one end and a one-level tower at the other. In between was a 200-foot long rope. You had to climb the three-tiered tower.
And once at the top, you grabbed the rope, swung underneath the rope, and pulled yourself hand over hand until you got to the other end. The record for the obstacle course had stood for years when my class began in 1977. The record seemed unbeatable until one day a student decided to go down the slide for life headfirst.
Instead of swinging his body underneath the rope and inching his way down, he bravely mounted the top of the rope and thrust himself forward. It was a dangerous move, seemingly foolish and fraught with risk. Failure could mean injury and being dropped from the course.
Without hesitation, the student slid down the rope perilously fast. Instead of several minutes, it only took him half that time. And by the end of the course, he had broken the record.
If you want to change the world, sometimes you have to slide down the obstacles headfirst. During the land warfare phase of training, the students are flown out to San Clemente Island, which lies off the coast of San Diego. The waters off San Clemente are a breeding ground for the great white sharks.
To pass SEAL training, there are a series of long swims that must be completed. One is the night swim. Before the swim, the instructors joyfully brief the students on all the species of sharks that inhabit the waters off San Clemente.
They assure you, however, that no student has ever been eaten by a shark, at least not that they can remember. But you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position, stand your ground. Do not swim away.
Do not act afraid. And if a shark, hungry for a midnight snack, darts towards you, then summons up all your strength and punch him in the snout. And he will turn and swim away.
There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim, you will have to deal with them. So if you want to change the world, don’t back down from the sharks.
As Navy SEALs, one of our jobs is to conduct underwater attacks against enemy shipping. We practice this technique extensively during training. The ship attack mission is where a pair of SEAL divers is dropped off outside an enemy harbor and then swims well over two miles underwater, using nothing but a depth gauge and a compass to get to the target.
During the entire swim, even well below the surface, there is some light that comes through. It is comforting to know that there is open water above you. But as you approach the ship, which is tied to a pier, the light begins to fade.
The steel structure of the ship blocks the moonlight. It blocks the surrounding street lamps. It blocks all ambient light.
To be successful in your mission, you have to swim under the ship and find the keel, the center line, and the deepest part of the ship. This is your objective. But the keel is also the darkest part of the ship, where you cannot see your hand in front of your face, where the noise from the ship’s machinery is deafening, and where it gets to be easily disoriented.
And you can fail. Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at that darkest moment of the mission, is a time when you need to be calm, when you must be calm, when you must be composed, when all your tactical skills, your physical power, and your inner strength must be brought to bear. If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moments.
The ninth week of training is referred to as Hell Week. It is six days of no sleep, constant physical and mental harassment, and one special day at the Mud Flats. The Mud Flats are an area between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana Sloughs, a swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you.
It is on Wednesday of Hell Week that you paddle down to the Mud Flats and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive this freezing cold. The howling wind and the incessant pressure to quit from the instructors. As the sun began to set that Wednesday evening, my training class, having committed some egregious infraction of the rules, was ordered into the mud.
The mud consumed each man until there was nothing visible but our heads. The instructors told us we could leave the mud if only five men would quit. Only five men, just five men, and we could get out of the oppressive cold.
Looking around the Mud Flat, it was apparent that some students were about to give up. It was still over eight hours till the sun came up. Eight more hours of bone-chilling cold.
The chattering teeth and the shivering moans of the trainees were so loud, it was hard to hear anything. And then one voice began to echo through the night. One voice raised in song.
The song was terribly out of tune, but sung with great enthusiasm. One voice became two, and two became three, and before long, everyone in the class was singing. The instructors threatened us with more time in the mud if we kept up the singing, but the singing persisted.
And somehow the mud seemed a little warmer, and the wind a little tamer, and the dawn not so far away. If I have learned anything in my time traveling the world, it is the power of hope. The power of one person.
A Washington, a Lincoln, King, Mandela, and even a young girl from Pakistan, Malala. One person can change the world by giving people hope. So if you want to change the world, start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud.
Finally, in SEAL training, there’s a bell. A brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see. All you have to do is quit.
All you have to do to quit is ring the bell. Ring the bell, and you no longer have to wake up at five o’clock. Ring the bell, and you no longer have to be in the freezing cold swims.
Ring the bell, and you no longer have to do the runs, the obstacle course, the PT, and you no longer have to endure the hardships of training. All you have to do is ring the bell to get out. If you want to change the world, don’t ever, ever ring the bell.
It will not be easy. Start each day with a task completed. Find someone to help you through life.
Respect everyone. Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often. But if you take some risks, step up when the times are the toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden, and never, ever give up.
If you do these things, the next generation and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today. And what started here will indeed have changed the world for the better. Thank you very much.
Steve Jobs delivers an inspirational speech. Listen to the end for the most life changing quote of all-time. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you cannot achieve your dreams.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it, no big deal, just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why’d I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young unwed graduate student and she decided to put me up for adoption.
She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents who were on a waiting list got a call in the middle of the night asking, we’ve got an unexpected baby boy, do you want him? They said, of course.
My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And 17 years later I did go to college but I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford and all of my working class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn’t see the value in it.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.
It was pretty scary at the time but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting. It wasn’t all romantic.
I didn’t have a dorm room so I slept on the floor in friends rooms. I returned coke bottles for the five cent deposits to buy food with and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it and much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
Let me give you one example. Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed.
Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer it all came back to me and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
If I had never dropped in on that single course in college the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts and since Windows just copied the Mac it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college but it was very very clear looking backwards 10 years later.
Again you can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever, because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky I found what I love to do early in life. Waz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20.
We worked hard and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a two billion dollar company with over 4,000 employees. We just released our finest creation the Macintosh a year earlier and I just turned 30 and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me and for the first year or so things went well but then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.
When we did our board of directors sided with him and so at 30 I was out and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone and it was devastating. I really didn’t know what to do for a few months.
I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the valley but something slowly began to dawn on me.
I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I’d been rejected but I was still in love and so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years I started a company named Next, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer animated feature film Toy Story and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events Apple bought Next and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at Next is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick.
Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet keep looking and don’t settle as with all matters of the heart you’ll know when you find it and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on so keep looking don’t settle. My third story is about death.
When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like if you live each day as if it was your last someday you’ll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me and since then for the past 33 years I’ve looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself if today were the last day of my life would I want to do what I am about to do today and whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life because almost everything all external expectations all pride all fear of embarrassment or failure these things just fall away in the face of death leaving only what is truly important remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
You are already naked there is no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there and yet death is the destination we all share no one has ever escaped it and that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent it clears out the old to make way for the new right now the new is you but someday not too long from now you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
Sorry to be so dramatic but it’s quite true your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life don’t be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people’s thinking don’t let the noise of others opinions drowned out your own inner voice and most important have the courage to follow your heart and intuition they somehow already know what you truly want to become everything else is secondary stay hungry stay foolish.
