YouSaid · the spoken record

Stan McChrystal

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72
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2015-07-06
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2015-07-06
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  1. “It puts a person in the position of having to try to articulate what they think the perception of them by others is because there's a perception and often in the vetting process we'll figure that out because we'll get inputs from other people. But if you ask somebody and you said everybody loves you but they don't love this about you or they'd hire you, but it forces them. It's a couple of things. One, it forces them to come to grips with. What is it people don't love about me? And the second is they've got to say it to you. It could be very common knowledge, but if they don't have the courage to face up to it and tell somebody who's thinking about hiring them, that's a window in the personality, I think.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “The people at the bottom, if it was correlated across a bunch of people, would have pure rating problems and they would be looked at for release from the academy. You could also reach out across the core if you wanted to mention somebody very positively or very negatively, and they were called blue darts. And so if you knew me from another company and you thought I was a bad cadet, you could write one of these optional blue darts and just say he's a bad guy. Or if you thought good, you could do the positive. But the peer ratings were interesting because the first thing you think is, hey, these are going to be popularity contests without much validity. They actually didn't turn out that way. People tended to take them very seriously, and the correlation during my period with actual success later was very, very high. It was higher than anything else at the academy.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “It wasn't questions, in fact, what it was, was you ranked people in your company of, you know, there would be plebs in a company was about thirty by the time you graduated, it was typically called down by people even to 18 or 19. But every at least twice a year you did peer ratings and you would rank one to the bottom”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, at West Point, doing the tours was not always a correlating factor because I would tell you, a lot of guys just didn't get caught. I couldn't be a criminal now because I'm just not lucky enough. So I had a lot of guys who were doing what I did but didn't get caught. I would say that there's a higher correlation between people who know how to live life than there is between high academic performance at West Point or a perfect disciplinary record and success in the Army. The guys who really turned out to be good soldiers that I worked with from my peer group at West Point tended not to be at the top of the class, tended not to have perfect pristine records at West Point. They tended to have high peer ratings. We did peer ratings religiously. And so other people would look at them and say, you know.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “You carry an M14 that we use for parades and whatnot, and so as you walk back and forth, it's on right shoulder arm and then left shoulder arm and back and forth.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “It's very much. In fact, it was declared unconstitutional while I was a sophomore and I was under special confinement when it was, so it was quite a liberating thing. And then the punishment tours were funny because you get in a dress uniform and you walk back and forth across a concrete apron or open area. And my father explained to me that typical punishment might be go clean latrines or something, but they didn't think that was appropriate for officers, future officers. So they said, we're going to have them do something that's not flogging or anything, but it's absolutely useless. So you go out and you spend typically three hours at a shot walking back and forth. I mean, it's tiring, but it's not physically painful. But it's an utter waste of time. The one thing you don't have at West Point is any spare time. And so what they do is they take away your spare time with no sense of accomplishment. You don't even cut the grass.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Sure. West Point was designed to produce officers and gentlemen, and it was designed to be very disciplined. And so early in its process, it Some of which were pretty humorous, some of which were worthy of great story. Slug became the slang term for a disciplinary punishment that you received. So you would do something wrong and a slug would be a set of typically three things. You'd get a certain number of demerits. You'd get a certain number of punishment tours walking the area, and I'll describe that. And the last part would be confinement. When I was a cadet, they had something called special confinement where it was 24 hours a day unless you were in class or in the mess hall or something. You literally were on lockdown.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Because I thought it was a good window to them that the military seems like the day you're living, but it's really a life. It's a career, and it's going to have an arc and it's going to have ups and downs and left and rights, just like your personal life is. And so I found that really valuable.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I have probably given the most copies of a book written in 1968 by Anton Myr called Once an Eagle, and for a period of it's a story of two characters both who entered the military right during the First World War, and it follows them up through the Second World War and in fact into the postwar years. And it's on the one level, it's a little simplistic. There's one who is wealthy and ambitious and somewhat unscrupulous and the other who is a Nebraska farm boy who wins a medal of honor and thrifty, brave, clean reverent, etc. But it's actually more complex than that because it takes us through a whole career with all the nuances of Army life, the difficulties of peacetime service, slow promotions, and then the challenges of war and their personal side as well. And I gave that to a tremendous number of young officers and NCOs with whom I served.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “He says you're going to work out? And I said, Yeah, presumably I will. And he goes, you know, you come back here with a PhD, but you're out of shape. We're going to have a word for you, and it ain't going to be doctor. It also puts a discipline in the day. I find that if the day is terrible or whatever, but I worked out, at the end of the day I go, well, I had a good workout. Almost no matter what happens, when the Rolling Stone article came out, it came out about 1.30 in the morning. I found out about it. I made a couple calls. I knew we had a big problem, and I went and put my clothes on and I ran for an hour. Clear my head, stress myself. Didn't make it go away, but that was something that I do in those situations.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I think it's several things. There's a certain self-image, you know, I think that if I was struggling with my weight or if I was not as fit as I wanted people to perceive me and I couldn't perceive myself that way, I think my own self-esteem would suffer. And particularly over life now, whenever I'm injured and I have even a slight period, it bothers me a lot. So I think that's part of it. Second is the military. There's an expectation. If you are not a physical leader in the kind of organizations that Chris and I were in, if you can't do those things physically, you don't have to do it better than everybody else, but you have to do it credibly and they can look up to, then I think your status in the organization.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Yeah. So I can do all this from 4:30. I get it. If I get up at 4, I can do all that from 4 30 to about 5 20, 5.25. Go down to my gym. And then when I get to the gym, I do four sets of pull-ups. alternated with inclined bench press, alternated with standing curls, and then in that I'll also do these one legged things, balance exercises as the break between them. I was taught that was good for balance and whatnot. Now I'll do a few other things in that. And I can do all that in 30, 35 minutes. So by 615, 620, I can be done at the gym, head back home, get cleaned up, and then be start more.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Which is a flutter kick, 60 flutter kicks followed by static, then I'll do my fourth plank, which is now a minute and a half. And then I'll come back. I've only do four sets of push-ups, so the last time I don't do push-ups, I then do one more set of the crunch-like, and I'll flip over, do my last plank, which is one minute, and then I'll do some final yoga. And that'll take me about 45 to 50 minutes. Then I'll leave my house and go to the gym because my gym opens at 5.30. It's three blocks from my house.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I will start at my home if we're at home and I go down to my basement, I do four sets of push-ups, as many as I can do for four sets, and I alternate that with a series of abs exercises. So I'll do starting with a set of sit-ups and I'll do 100 sit-ups and I'll flip over and I'll do three minutes of a plank and then I'll do some yoga that I learned for about two or three minutes. Then I'll do another set of push-ups and then I'll go to my next abs thing, which is a crunch-like crossover. Then I'll do a two and a half minute plank, and then I'll do more yoga slightly different. Then I'll do another set of push-ups, and then I'll do my third set, which is crossover sit-ups, and I'll then do a third plank of two minutes. I'm decreasing each time. Then I'll do some more yoga, and then I'll do my fourth set of push-ups, and then I'll do my fourth.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “As I got older and I started to have a series of shoulder surgeries and back surgeries, predictively, what I learned to do was to alternate. So I will run one day, I'll lift weight the next day, I'll bike when I'm home and have that capability so I can round out. But for me, it's very important to do something literally every day. I'll only take a day off when I'm forced to because I've got some weird schedule thing that makes it impossible.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “When I was younger and I got serious about working out, I was a second lieutenant, and as I mentioned, I started getting fat and I had a first sergeant in my parachute infantry company that liked to run. So we would do loosening up exercises and then we'd run. And so I started running. And so for the first 20 or so years, I ran. I had one period when I was a captain when I ran 15 miles a day, seven days a week. Didn't vary, didn't take days off, wore lousy running shoes. It was sort of stereotypically all the mistakes you can make.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “And then also they would come to him for what does the old man think? Because there are times when I'm moving 100 miles an hour and they'd come. And so a couple things had to be true. One, he had to know how the old man thanked. And two, he had to be able to articulate that in a way that was mature and whatnot. So it's really an interesting job. And as Chris described, you pull somebody up who's very experienced, but you also pull someone up that's got great potential, who will benefit from this unique experience and visibility. And that's, I think, Chris was my fourth or fifth aide de camp during that tour, and by far the best, but also I'd learned.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Embarrassed for my peer. And then they're trying to convince me that I wanted to do this job. And one, I swore to myself I'd never do that. Two, I sword to myself that I would never do that to people. And so when CRISP became aide-de-camp, it was more like being a chief of staff as Chris says, what he really, in my view, was he was the connection to the command. He was one of the connections, but probably the primary one. How I was viewed in many cases dependent upon how he coordinated with people.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Can I add some observations? When I was a captain, I was a company commander at a mechanized infantry unit, and the division commander, the two-star general, was a guy who later became pretty famous, and he was a pretty forceful kind of guy. And he had an aide de camp, and he wanted me to be the new aide de camp. So he came to visit me in the field when we were in the desert, and he was standing in front of me. It was early morning on a battle position, and he's looking at me and it was cold out, and he was talking to me. And I knew his aide-de-camp who was behind him. And he was standing there with a bag. And the general said, Captain McCresto, you want some coffee? And I said, no, thanks. He says, how about some soup? I said, no thanks. All my troops around there, you're not going to take anything, you know, that your troops don't get. And then he said, I think I'm going to have some soup. And he didn't turn around. He just reached his hand back and held his open hand there. And as I'm watching, his aide had to open this bag, pull out this soup, put the cup in, pour soup in it.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “I have a tendency I'll drink coffee, I'll drink other beverages too, water and different things. And I do find that there are certain days your body just says eat and eat right now. And I used to keep a bin of those hard pretzels in my office in Afghanistan, and I'd grab a handful of those. And other times I might be out doing something physical in the military like road marching, and suddenly your body communicates, eat pretty quickly or you won't keep road marching. And I'll do that. But otherwise, I like to stick to the idea of one tonight.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Well, whenever I'm finished work, it would be like eight or eight thirty. There's a challenge when you work really long hours because suddenly you start to eat very late and then you go directly to bed that you feel like you're sleeping with a football in your stomach.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I do. And people ask me why is it some Zen connection with something? And no, what happened was when I was a lieutenant in special forces many, many years ago, I thought I was getting fat. And I started running and I started running distance, which I enjoyed. But I also found that my personality was such that I'm not real good at eating three or four small disciplined meals. I'm better to defer gratification and then eat one meal. And for me, that's dinner. And so what I do is I sort of push myself hard all day, try to get everything done and sort of reward myself with dinner at night.”

    2015-07-06 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #86: General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT