This is the Jocko Underground podcast number 205 sitting here with Echo Charles. We have questions from the field and we will provide to the best of our ability answers in some cases, recommendations in other cases, and at a minimum, some courses of action that you can take to move forward on the path. Well said. First question. First question is, okay, good evening, Jocko and Echo Charles. I'm a high school senior preparing to matriculate at Virginia at a Virginia Military Institute in August. I'm an avid CrossFit athlete at my school at my school and would like to start PJJ. I was wondering what advice you would have regarding time management in a high stress environment and how to get into a I won't quit mindset. Okay, so you know, you're you're what you want to do is you want to get involved in some basic stress inoculation. And what that means, you have to do some stressful things to inoculate yourself. Sounds like you're doing some of them, right? You know, some CrossFit, those are some psycho hard workouts, they're going to put some stress on you. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu definitely can put some stress on you and get you if you compete in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to overcome some, some stress there. I don't know what actual sports you did. Like wrestling or football or basketball or tennis or rowing or cross or whatever, track something like so that you get stress in those situations. I watched the interview with Jewel on Joe Rogan. You familiar with Jewel? Yeah, those a while ago. Yeah, it was a while ago. But I remembered it because she runs like an academy for kids or like a school for kids. And one of the things that they do to prepare the kids for life is they play tennis. And Joe Rogan was kind of like, Oh, why did my buddy play tennis? Did you play tennis? And she's like, No, no, I didn't play it. But it's super stressful, right? Because it's all on you. And if you have a small room for error, so, you know, whatever, like it's any of these sports is going to give you some level of stress. And they're also going to help you, you have to have grit, right? Because if you're wrestling or you're playing football or tennis or basketball or rowing or, you know, jiu-jitsu, you are going to be put in stressful situations, it's going to be hard and you can't quit, right? So that's good. So you want to get stress inoculation, do stressful things. You want to get into a mindset where you're not going to quit, do hard things. As far as the time management piece goes, the time management under stress, you got to first of all, you have to eliminate procrastination, you just got to do the thing, just do the thing, right? That's number one. You have something to do, do it. Get as far ahead of the power curve as you can, right? And the way that you do that is don't do anything later that you can do now. Don't do one thing later that you can do now. Do the thing now. Don't wait. That's important. Because it's really easy when you're, when you go, oh, you know what, I don't need to get this done tonight because I've got time in the morning. Don't do that. Do it tonight. Do it tonight. I'm very good about that. I'm almost like a 9.8 out of 10. I am not going to go to bed until I have the thing ready. It's the rule. Yeah. And it's, it's actually borderline, borderline anxiety where like, I can't sleep because I know I've got that thing or something happens in the morning and though the water heater breaks and like whatever, like, yeah, something goes wrong. You know, I've owned like, like, uh, for the podcast, for this podcast, I will print out notes the night before. Because if there's something wrong with that printer in the morning, you know, now we got to probably get, I can email you like, Hey man, printer's not working. Can you print these notes out? Cool. I think I've done that to you twice. Yeah. Or we printed them out at victory. Yeah. But anyways, you know what I'm saying? It's hard for me to sleep. I'm pretty good. My printer's, I've got a really good printer right now at my house. Perfect. So I've, I've eased up on that a little bit. So, but if you can do something, now do it now. Don't put it off. Anything that you can get done now, get it done now because you don't know what's coming. So that's a step. Here's another thing with time management that is very important. Some things only have to be good enough. You know what I'm saying? So to get something good enough takes 20 minutes to get it perfect takes two hours. You know what I'm saying? Like this is very common. There's a lot of things in life. You will waste a bunch of time trying to do. And by the way, military indoctrination programs, they do that to the end three. They will, they will give you tasks that if you do them perfect, you will not succeed because you'll be doing this one particular task perfect and you'll fail everything else. So you really have to learn what tasks just need to be good enough and what things, because there are some things you're going to need to be as perfect as possible. So keep that in mind. What only needs to be good enough? And you know, the different, you know, I was talking about this the other day with Andy Stumpf. To get a 90 on a test takes 45 minutes of study. To get a, to get a, you know, a 30 takes zero minutes. To get a 90 takes 45 minutes. To get a hundred takes four or five hours. By the way, both those things say a. So you got to, you got to figure that out. And now listen, if there's a course where you're grade has dropped and you need to pull up the average so you get an A, cool. You might need, there's some times where you might need to spend that three, four hours studying so that you make you pull, make sure you get a hundred and pull up that grade. But generally speaking, you need to figure out what is the optimum speed? You know, the optimum speed, like they have an aircraft, like how can you go the longest mileage? You know, what speed is it? Because if you've got to pedal down to the floor, you're going to go less distance. So you need to keep that in mind. And that means you need to learn to prioritize and execute, right? What is worth doing perfect and versus what is just worth doing? As far as stress goes, especially in like a Virginia military institute, you have to remember that it's a game. I'm not saying that in a negative way. I'm not saying that in a demeaning way. It's a game. Look, I went to Navy Boot Camp. It's a game. I went to basic underwater demolition and seal training. It's a game. Officer candidate school. It's a game. Seer school. It's a game. All these things are games. So if you, you have to remember that it's a game and the more, if you care too much, it's going to create stress. I'm not saying don't care, but if you get wrapped around the axle about something that you shouldn't care about, they're, they're going to find it. They're going to figure out what that is. They're going to be looking for your weakness and they're going to try and exploit it and they're going to try and capitalize on it. For example, if you care about something too much, it can cause a problem. IE the classic example is like a mom joke. Right? Oh yeah. You know, oh, your mom, your, your mom was just over here. Right? It's just a, it's a joke. Right? Occasionally, you see people fly off the handle with that stuff. Right? So now they've created a problem. And look, I'm not saying that you don't care about your mom. I'm not saying you shouldn't defend your mom's honor and all that stuff. What I'm saying is they're going to be saying a bunch of stuff to get in your head. A bunch of stuff. They're going to be doing things to try and make you, to try and cause stress. They come in and start, you know, throwing your, you've spent all night organizing your locker for the locker inspection. They come in and start throwing things around and you spend a lot of time on it and you really care about it. Bro, it's going to be much, much worse than if you go, huh, that's funny. It's a game. So with highly stressful things, you know, obviously detach, obviously take a step back, obviously don't let your emotions get involved. But one of the things that causes you to fail to detach and causes you to get emotional is when you care so much about something and you, and you don't step away from that. So please just, just chill, just relax a little bit. The stress is, they're looking for indications of things that will make you freak out and they're going to focus on those things that they're going to cause stress. And then they don't quit attitude. You just don't give yourself another option. You know, this is not, I don't have a great way to develop a don't quit attitude because I don't, I never thought about it. I didn't have to go through some protocol to come up with a no quit attitude. I was like, oh, I'm not going to quit. I wasn't even, I didn't even think really like I'm never going to quit. I didn't ever even thought that. I never thought that. I never thought like, oh, like, I need to develop a no quit attitude. I never thought like never said, I'm not going to quit. I never said that. I wasn't even thinking about it. I wasn't even a thing. It would be like, if I said, Hey, Echo, are you going to go, you know, jump in the tar pit when we get done with this podcast? Have you thought about that today? I've not thought about that. That's how much I thought about quitting as much as you thought about going to jump in a tar pit after this podcast. You didn't think about it at all. It wasn't a thing. So that's where I was. So I would just get it completely out of your system. That's not even a thing. I don't even know what it, it's not even an option. I haven't even thought about it. Oh, you look like you're going to say something. Yeah. Well, I was thinking of yesterday, we're talking to Andy Stump. He said something and it was, it was a more specific version of he didn't have a plan B. He said, Yeah, you don't want your plan B to do B2 tempting. Yeah. At that time, he said it, but the way he said it kind of made it slightly different, more specific. He said, he said, Oh, I didn't have anything else better to do. That's what he said. So I was like, Oh, yeah, which kind of means like I didn't have a plan B. I get that part of it, but it's like, when you say I didn't have anything better to do, it's kind of like, yeah, I'm going to quit, but why would I quit? It's not like there's some relief somewhere. I don't have anywhere to be. Suffering here is kind of the only thing I've been thinking about. I felt that too on a little smaller levels, obviously, than compared to Bud's, but I remember one time all my family was gone, and I was like, I went to work out. I was like, I'm not in the mood to work out or whatever, but I'm out here working out. I'm like, what am I going to do? I'm not rushing to dinner or nothing. I literally had like all day and all night. I could rack my brain for something to get done for sure. But I'm like, I don't have anything better to do. Let's do this workout, seem saying. So it's kind of like that. It's like there's nothing you're not quitting for anything. So it's like quitting is not, doesn't seem like there's anything better to do. So you might as well just stick around kind of a thing. That's what I was thinking about. Yeah. So that's it, man. Stress inoculation, keep pushing yourself. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko underground podcast. So if you want to continue to listen, go to jocko underground.com and subscribe. And we're doing this. We're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control. And we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko podcast, which will remain as is free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors. And we're doing it so we can give you more control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now, where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So thank you. It's jocko underground.com. 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