I'm wondering if "learn to swim" is on there. :)

I think he takes that as a given because his advice is more to find someone who can paddle with you.

Full transcript:

http://www.utexas.edu/news/2014/05/16/admiral-mcraven-commencement-speech/

And the speech:

I do like the ritual of doing something organized first thing in the morning:

McRaven, a 1977 UT grad, riffed on the school’s motto (“What starts here changes the world.”) to deliver the 10 lessons he learned during his SEAL training. Among them: If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

“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.”

He closes the speech with the classic SEAL metaphor for failure: ringing the bell. “Don’t ever, ever ring the bell,” he says.

I find this inspiring:

But, if every one of you changed the lives of just ten people—and each one of those folks changed the lives of another ten people—just ten—then in five generations—125 years—the class of 2014 will have changed the lives of 800 million people.

800 million people—think of it—over twice the population of the United States. Go one more generation and you can change the entire population of the world—8 billion people.

If you think it’s hard to change the lives of ten people—change their lives forever—you’re wrong.

I saw it happen every day in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A young Army officer makes a decision to go left instead of right down a road in Baghdad and the ten soldiers in his squad are saved from close-in ambush.

In Kandahar province, Afghanistan, a non-commissioned officer from the Female Engagement Team senses something isn’t right and directs the infantry platoon away from a 500 pound IED, saving the lives of a dozen soldiers.

But, if you think about it, not only were these soldiers saved by the decisions of one person, but their children yet unborn—were also saved. And their children’s children—were saved.

Generations were saved by one decision—by one person.

But changing the world can happen anywhere and anyone can do it.

Becoming a Navy SEAL sounds like torture:

Basic SEAL training is six months of long torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacles courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and always being cold, wet and miserable.

It is six months of being constantly harassed by professionally trained warriors who seek to find the weak of mind and body and eliminate them from ever becoming a Navy SEAL.

But, the training also seeks to find those students who can lead in an environment of constant stress, chaos, failure and hardships.

To me basic SEAL training was a life time of challenges crammed into six months.

...

SEAL training was a great equalizer.  Nothing mattered but your will to succeed.  Not your color, not your ethnic background, not your education and not your social status.

If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart, not 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 and your belt buckle shiny and void of any smudges.

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 the uniform inspection, the student had to run, fully clothed into the surfzone and 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 a “sugar cookie.” You stayed in that 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 effort was in vain.  That no matter how hard they tried to get the uniform right—it was 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.

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 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.  Overtime those students-—who did two hours of extra calisthenics—got stronger and stronger.

The pain of the circuses built inner strength-built 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 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 high wall, a 30-foot cargo net, and 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 training in 1977.

The record seemed unbeatable, until one day, a student decided to go down the slide for life—head first.

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 training.

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.

Do your best when times are worst:

If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment.

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 area between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana slue’s—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 the freezing cold mud, 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 till there was nothing visible but our heads.  The instructors told us we could leave the mud if only five men would quit—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 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.

We knew that if one man could rise above the misery then others could as well.

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, 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—Washington, 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 is a bell.  A brass bell that hangs in the center of the compound for all the students to see.

All you have to do to quit—is ring the bell.  Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o’clock.  Ring the bell and you no longer have to do 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.

Just ring the bell.

If you want to change the world don’t ever, ever ring the bell.

Awesome. Navy SEAL wisdom condensed into a few bullets (for me):

1.  Sometimes no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform you still end up as a sugar cookie.

2.  Life is filled with circuses...But if you want to change the world, don’t be afraid of the circuses.

3.  If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment.

4. 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.

5.  If you want to change the world don’t ever, ever ring the bell. (cf Winston Churchill's "Never Give Up" speech)

Well said. And of those, #3 and #4 resonate most with me.

I've been thinking about this speech a lot, and I think the bullet points I've seen have too much Navy jargon -- sugar cookie, ring the bell, etc -- instead of focusing on his really important but surprisingly subtle message.

It seems clear that people who make it to Navy SEAL training in the first place are going to be very driven, high-performing, achievement-oriented individuals. But the training itself appears to be largely designed to weed out the ones who have rigid notions of fairness, cost-benefit, or human perfectability -- which I am guessing is actually quite a few of those high-performers. So the actual lesson here is that the very qualities which take you to the brink of greatness might in fact be the things that end up holding you back!

Fairness, cost-benefit, and human perfectability... those seem like really good notions to have! Leaders need to be fair, to show their troops that risks will be rewarded, and to encourage maximum effort. But if you buy into these values TOO MUCH, you risk brushing up against what the great Buddhist monk Kenko called VANITY. Can a human really be perfect? What happens when a person who has always lived by excellence is thrown into a situation where the external environment changes radically? Can they adapt or will they break? I'm reminded of John McCain's observation of his time in the notorious Hanoi Hilton: that the men who made it through were the ones who always had hope of an end to captivity but who never bought into a SPECIFIC scenario by which this would be effected.

Because I've always been the token fuck-up in a world of high achievers, it's been easy to see a million examples of peers who have always been successful with a particular strategy and then cannot adapt when that strategy temporarily or permanently stops working. Living with failure, especially failure deliberately engineered by others, is often not very easy for those who have always played and triumphed by the rules. It takes a certain mindset to be able to proudly sit around in a sand-covered uniform all day, or to sing while lying up to the neck in cold mud. Maybe you don't need to be a natural-born fuck-up, but you almost certainly need to have some fuck-you in your makeup.

An ongoing theme among PandaWhale posts is that it's more important to have a system than a specific goal. Because a system is resilient to failure, whereas failing to make a goal can potentially be devastating to a person. 

That's an eloquent observation you made, and a good coda to the Navy SEAL's speech. 

Good rant by Halibut Boy about intrinsic motivation:

http://pandawhale.com/post/46860/one-type-of-motivation-may-be-key-to-success