LETTER 8
We sow a thought and reap an act;
We sow an act and reap a habit;
We sow a habit and reap a character;
We sow a character and reap a destiny.
—ANONYMOUS
Walker,
Do you remember when we went to Camp Pendleton and they taught us how to shoot a rifle? We were pretty pumped. After months of runs, swims, and rounds on the obstacle course, finally we were going to get a chance to actually shoot.
One of the first things we did was to lie prone in the mud. We rested our rifles on sandbags, looked down our sights, fired at targets twenty-five meters away, and made adjustments until we’d each sighted in. When we got up we were covered in mud like a bunch of happy pigs. We walked around with our rifles and didn’t have to say a word to each other. This was cool. We’d earned this together. Now this was gonna start being fun.
Then one of the instructors called us over and he lay down on the ground. He modeled for us how to properly fire from the prone position. Then they took us back to that long cement alley that ran behind the targets. They told us to lie on our stomach and bring the rifle up to firing position with our elbows arrowed into the ground. We lay there. And we lay there. And we lay there, looking down the sights of our rifles as our weight and the weight of the rifle ran through our elbows into the concrete.
At first we didn’t mind. It was uncomfortable, but we’d been uncomfortable many times before. It was an irritant to the elbows no worse than an itch. But we held that position, and as the minutes passed, the sensation grew into pain. We didn’t dare move. Then it started to burn a little. A few minutes more and it felt as if the bone of my elbow was going to cut through my skin. We were all thinking, If we move, are they going to beat us?
Then, finally, somebody in our class whispered what we’d all been thinking: “Why does everything at BUD/S have to suck?”
Later that day, they taught us the concept of “natural point of aim.” Your natural point of aim is the point toward which your bullets will fly when everything else is steady.
Lying on the ground and holding your rifle firmly, you focus on your front sight. You close your eyes. You breathe in, let the breath out slowly, and then—at rest—you open your eyes. Now everything—you, the rifle, your breathing—is at rest. You look down the sights of your rifle to see where your bullet will fly: you’re looking at your natural point of aim.
Small modifications can alter the trajectory of your bullet—up to a point. But if you really want to change your results, you have to reset your natural point of aim.
Your life has a natural point of aim. It flies in the direction of your habits. To change the direction of your life, you have to reset your habits.
—2—
—PLOTINUS (205–270)
You have enormous potential to create yourself.
Human beings have enormous potential for self-sacrifice, for courage, for feats of extraordinary endurance, for works of breathtaking beauty. Yet human beings also abuse and torture—sometimes with creativity and delight. They enslave and exploit their fellow human beings. They enact elaborate schemes to inflict pain in the lives of others.
The extremes of which we are capable could fill you with joy or with angst, with hope or with fear. They should, at least, fill you with seriousness about your own possibilities to create yourself.
Every time you act, your actions create feelings—pleasure or pain, pride or shame—that reinforce habits. With each repetition, what was once novel becomes familiar.
If you are cruel every day, you become a cruel person. If you are kind every day, you become a kind person. It is easier to be compassionate the tenth time than the first time. Unfortunately, it is also easier to be cruel the tenth time than the first time.
When a habit has become so ingrained that actions begin to flow from you without conscious thought or effort, then you have changed your character.
If we are intentional about what we repeatedly do, we can practice who we want to become. And through practice, we can become who we want to be.
—3—
Walker,
Do you believe that magicians can saw people in half and put them back together? Do you believe that magicians can levitate in the air or make whole buildings disappear?
Of course not. You recognize these tricks as illusions.
Now, if you’re like me, you still enjoy the shows. It’s fascinating to see how magicians make us see things that can’t possibly be true. It’s fun, even if I’m aware that I’m looking at illusions.
Today I want to talk about one of the illusions that distort how we see our lives. It’s called “the critical decision.”
When people tell the story of their lives, or stories about their families, their companies, their communities, or their country, they like the stories that come to a suspenseful climax.
It’s just how good stories go: “And then he made his fateful decision . . .” And whether you are talking about a bedraggled Army crossing a frozen river to win a revolution, three hundred warriors standing shoulder to shoulder against invasion, or Zach Walker leaving the Teams and coming home to Cazadero, we like to tell stories that focus on these isolated moments.
When I was in college, we used case studies to examine “critical decisions” in ethics. Sometimes we’d be given fictional scenarios and then asked, “What would you do?” This is all good and healthy. Stories told like this can impart wisdom, and decisions studied like this can provide insight. And, more than good and healthy, sometimes such stories are also accurate. There are times when the world holds its breath, waiting to see what men and women of courage will do. There are times when “one man with courage makes a majority.” There are choices made by individuals and small teams that shape the fate of the world and alter the course of human progress.
Three hundred Spartans did make a stand at Thermopylae. Caesar did cross the Rubicon. Washington did cross the Delaware.
All of these moments are fascinating. But here’s the rub: most people, most of the time, are not confronted with “critical decisions.”
The vast majority of us, the vast majority of the time, simply have to live our lives well. We have to make many important decisions, of course, but the fate of our lives rarely hangs in the balance.
We decide to get married or divorced, to have children or not, to go to school or drop out, to move across the country, to join the military, to take a job, to pursue a relationship, to open a business. It can be tempting, in retrospect, to single out one moment and declare, “That was when everything changed.”
But it’s not true. Most lives aren’t that neat. When you read a good biography, or you come to know a good friend, what you begin to see is that the direction of that person’s life is shaped not by a single turning point, but by thousands of days, each filled with small, unspectacular decisions and small, unremarkable acts that make us who we are.
You’ll understand your own life better, and the lives of others better, if you stop looking for critical decisions and turning points. Your life builds not by dramatic acts, but by accumulation.
Why, then, do people like to believe in the big decision or the critical moment? Why do people think the only way to change is through some sort of earthshattering conversion experience?
Because magic’s fun. It’s fun to watch a person get sawed in half and put back together. And it’s fun to think that after a lifetime of laziness someone can suddenly produce great work. It’s easy and comforting to believe that a single moment’s kindness can wipe out a lifetime habit of cruelty. It’s fantastic to believe that the man who’s always been a coward will awaken and find courage.
People like to imagine that they will “rise to the occasion.” They taught us in the Teams that people rarely do. What happens, in fact, is that when things get really hard and people are really afraid, they sink to the level of their training.
You train your habits. And if a critical moment does come, all you can be is ready for it.
People do change their lives. Sometimes radically. Ask some recovering alcoholics. Ask some former prisoners. Ask some women who have left abusive husbands. Thousands of people do this. But there’s only one way it happens. It happens through hard work.
You’ve never been afraid of hard work, Walker. And that’s the only kind of magic you need to believe in. You don’t need a turning point, an epiphany, a miracle moment to change your life. How many people have put off the necessary, unglamorous work of building habits because they spend their lives waiting for an epiphany that never comes?
Don’t wait. Don’t wait a single day.
Live.
—4—
Some people think of habits as patterns of action that enslave us. They see someone who acts out of habit as an automaton who lives without choice. But consider the ways in which habits can liberate you.
A life without habits—in which we had to consider from scratch each day which shoe to tie first and how we want to brush our teeth—would leave us exhausted. By relying on habits, we free our minds to focus on what matters most.
In the middle of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous notebooks, there’s a section called “The Practice of Painting.” It’s full of pages and pages of advice to beginners from a master. Look at it for a few minutes, and it’s obvious that you’re reading the work of a man beautifully obsessed with his craft.
Leonardo starts from the beginning: how to trace and copy the work of a great artist before you. Then he writes about mastering the details of human anatomy:
It is indispensable to a painter who would be thoroughly familiar with the limbs in all the positions and actions of which they are capable, in the nude, to know the anatomy of the sinews, bones, muscles and tendons so that, in their various movements and exertions, he may know which nerve or muscle is the cause of each movement and show those only as prominent and thickened, and not the others all over, as many do who, to seem great draftsmen, draw their nude figures looking like wood, devoid of grace; so that you would think you were looking at a sack of walnuts rather than the human form, or a bundle of radishes rather than the muscles of figures.
Before you can paint, he says, you have to know the nerves and tendons and muscles behind every movement. The lesson goes on and on: how to set up your studio; whether to paint alone or with friends; how wide to open your studio’s window; the best kind of light to paint in; “how to draw a figure on a wall 12 braccia high which shall look 24 braccia high”; where to find a good mirror; why some shadows are more pleasant to look at than others; how to paint skin; why faces look darker when seen from farther away; how to depict anger and despair; how to paint a flood or a man making a speech; how, even in your spare time, you should come up with games to test the sharpness of your eye and the steadiness of your hand; how, when you close your eyes to go to sleep, you should see in your mind’s eye the figures you painted that day in all their detail.
Here’s the thing, Walker: Do you think Leonardo had to think much about any of that when he sat down to paint his masterworks? I doubt it. He had been studying and practicing and building habits his entire life. When he sat down and took up his brush, all of that, all of it, was a part of him. He had attained a level of unconscious competence.
What do you see when you watch a painter like this humming away at his work? Do you see a slave, a robot? Or do you see someone finally free to do what he was put on earth to do?
—5—
Generally speaking, children have a greater capacity for resilience than adults. This is not just because they are younger. And it is not just because they have different bodies or more supple brains. It’s because, in my opinion, adults have forgotten how to fail.
Many adults are fearful of failure, while children have to be familiar with failure. What is growing up except failing over and over again—at walking, at tying your shoes, at reading, at riding a bike, at doing math, at writing a sentence?
If you’re growing, you’re likely failing. If you’re not failing, you’re likely not growing.
(And one caveat here: I’m not really sure that many American children today are more resilient than adults. When we swaddle our kids in bubble wrap, keep red ink off their school papers to spare their feelings, rush to pick them up every time they fall, don’t let them climb trees, and give them trophies for everything they do—we have stopped letting them fail.)
Are you still willing to fail, Walker?
As time passes, some people become especially fearful of failure. They seek to protect what they’ve accumulated. They lose the hunger and daring of their early days. Comfortable in a cocoon, they experiment less. They try fewer new things. They embrace fewer adventures.
As we become older, it is comforting to know that we have earned a measure of proficiency and mastery through years of practice. It is fine and fitting to be proud of what we’ve done. But adults can come to stake their identity on the success they have attained, while losing the very spirit and character that made success possible in the first place.
The prospect of a new adventure promises a confrontation with our inadequacies and failings. Adventure can throw our comfortable sense of self into doubt. No wonder, then, that many people have only one or two or zero adventures in their lives. Too often we see people, by the end of their lives, balancing atop an ever narrower set of experiences and teetering like an elephant on a stick.
We can make a different choice. We can choose, at any age, to have adventures and growth and happiness. We can begin again. We can have all of this, as long as we are still willing to fail.
And happiness . . . what is it? I say it is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing or that, but simply growth.
—JOHN BUTLER YEATS
We should be, in part, beginners for our entire lives. Beginning anew refreshes the habit of learning.
To begin again does not mean that we start something new every day. That is not to begin, but to bounce. Nor does it mean that we abandon what we learned at each new beginning. But if every few years we dedicate a part of ourselves to a new endeavor, we find that we are again disciples, and that the habit of beginning is renewed. We are reminded of how we grow, we are reminded that we can grow, and we are reminded of how we profit from growth.
Or, we can decay.
Virtues that are not practiced die. Resilience that is not practiced weakens. The only way to keep resilience alive—through success, through temporary comfort, and through the challenges of age—is to engage ourselves in purposeful learning at every step of life. Every master must still have a master. Every good teacher must still be a student.
—6—
To learn resilience, children must be exposed to hardship. If they don’t meet hardship early, they’ll certainly find it later. And if they haven’t built a habit of resilience and earned some self-respect by then, the adult pain they meet probably won’t strengthen them. It will likely overwhelm them.
You know how a vaccine works. We build a healthy immune system not by staying clear of germs and pathogens, but by exposing ourselves to them. A vaccine—usually a small, weakened form of a virus—allows our immune system to build the resistance that inoculates us for when we meet the virus full force. Without the benefit of a vaccine in childhood, a virus can kill us when we’re adults.
Protecting children from all suffering is, in fact, one of the only ways to ensure that they will be overwhelmed and badly hurt one day. They will have none of the resources, the experiences, the spiritual reserves of courage and fortitude necessary to make it through future difficulties. You wouldn’t want that for your kids, and I don’t want it for mine.
There’s one sure way to build self-respect: through achievement. A child who learns to tie her own shoes grows in confidence. So does a child who learns to spell his name. So does a student who learns to stand in front of class and read his poem.
Self-respect isn’t something a teacher or a coach or a government can hand you. Self-respect grows through self-created success: not because we’ve been told we’re good, but when we know we’re good.
Not everyone gets a trophy, because not every performance merits celebration. If we want our children to have a shot at resilience, they must learn what failure means. If they don’t learn that lesson from loving parents and coaches and teachers, life will teach it to them in a far harsher way.
Children need to be loved. And part of loving is to comfort, hug, and hold them when they are hurting. Both you and I know that, especially as parents, it is our job to provide love at all times and in all circumstances. But as guys who want to protect other people, we have to realize that we can overdo this. As hard as it is to do, part of loving someone means letting her experience hurt in the right way.
In trying to protect too much, kind people can inflict great cruelty.
I cracked up reading your letter about playing “football” with your buddy Kevin as a kid in Cazadero. I’m putting “football” in quotes, because traditionally football fields don’t include water hazards and a three-foot drop.
Kevin’s nickname was “Wart,” mine was the less flattering “Droopy,” but when we stepped on the football field, together we were “the Gut Brothers.” . . . The field we played on was a pasture that sheep grazed on, which doubled as clay pigeon cemetery. The uphill side got steep, but if you had the energy to run up the hill, there was no out of bounds. On the downhill side there was a three-foot drop onto the dirt driveway that led up to Kevin and Randy’s house. The south side of the field had an end zone marked by a large fig tree which hung over a stream that split the pasture, and the northern end zone was a three-foot butt-cut redwood log.
This all meant that if you had the ball you could be tackled into a steaming heap of sheep dung or stabbed by broken clay pigeons upon hitting the ground. If you were close to an end zone you ran the risk of ending up in a stream or pile-drived into a redwood tree, and if you were even remotely close to the road, you turned upfield and prayed that the larger guys running downhill at you didn’t launch off the drop and send you into the dirt road ass over teakettle.
Worst of all was fumbling the ball or dropping a pass. If the ball hit your hands and you didn’t catch it, you’d catch a whoopin’ in the huddle. Fumbling was worse. That gave the other team the ball, and you’d really get roughed up for that. We took our share of beatings for both of those offenses and still came back for more.
Some of these things happened to most of us every time we played, but being the smallest, slowest, and weakest brought about a knowing that one, if not all, of those things was going to happen to you every time for sure. You couldn’t sell out, though. If you didn’t play football, you weren’t a logger.
It didn’t take long before the word was out: the Gut Brothers didn’t fumble and they could catch anything thrown in their vicinity.
Walker, do you wish that you’d had a well-meaning adult who shut down your football games so that you didn’t get hurt? Of course not. You got roughed up, and it did you good.
Parents and safety have a place, of course. I remember one time when my friends and I were firing bottle rockets at each other. We were each armed with a Wiffle ball bat. The bats had a small hole at the base. We’d slide a bottle rocket into the bat, light the fuse, and run through the yard holding the bat like a gun and aiming the rocket until it fired at our friends. My friend’s mom came outside and saw us. I’d never heard her yell before, but she screamed, “Mark Timothy”—she even busted out the middle name—“get over here right now!”
She was right. We could have blown each other’s eyes out.
Extreme recklessness is dangerous. But extreme caution is dangerous in its own way. And I’ve seen our culture shift further and further toward extreme caution.
Now let’s not get carried away: challenging our children can also be overdone. Let’s be clear that challenging children works best when children are loved—and when they are challenged because they are loved.
There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the children who are most likely and most willing to take risks are those who know that they can return to loving parents and a secure home. We often venture most boldly when we understand that our ventures are not all or nothing—when we are confident that we have a safe and welcoming home to return to.
Resilience—the willingness and ability to endure hardship and become better by it—is a habit that sinks its roots in the soil of security.
The child who is always protected from harm will never be resilient.
At the same time, the child who is never loved will rarely be resilient.
The goal, then, is to build as early as possible a habit of intelligent risk-taking. We learn to find the happy medium between fearfulness and recklessness.
There’s a common misconception that wildly successful people are reckless. When Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico, he supposedly ordered his crew to burn their ships—telling them, in other words, that there was no retreat from their mission to conquer the New World. They would win or die. As it turns out, that’s a legend. And, true or not, it’s a pretty poor guide to the art of intelligent risk-taking.
It’s true that full commitment often breeds full effort. Armies, dogs, and people sometimes fight most fiercely when they’re cornered. And great deeds sometimes do begin when we leave our pasts entirely behind.
But the grand gesture and the decisive moment demand a different approach from the good of every day. The reality is that great risk takers often have a safe place to retreat to, a place of confidence and security that enables them to dare greatly. Children who fall from the tree retreat to the arms of their loving parents. Adults retreat to their homes, to their spouses, to their friends, or to their hobbies.
For most people engaged in most pursuits of excellence, we are not dealing with a single important day of decision. We are dealing instead with days and weeks and months and years of accumulated effort, consistent practice, and wise habit formation.
That kind of effort demands great reserves of energy, and even those who take huge amounts of energy from their work frequently build oases of safety, set aside from their risk-taking. That, too, is part of the habit of resilience.
When you leave for work every day, you don’t burn your house down.
If there’s one thing I hope you’ll take from this, it’s the promise that you don’t have to serve your habits. Your habits can serve you. They can strengthen and reinforce the kind of person you want to become.
You have power over your habits. That also means you’re responsible for your habits. So let’s talk about what it means to be responsible.