Podcast #105: Resilience With Eric Greitens

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Well I am really excited about our guest today, one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever encountered. His name’s Eric Greitens. Truman Scholar, Rhodes Scholar, studied at Oxford. He did humanitarian work with war refugees in Croatia and Rwanda and in other places in the world. After he graduated from Oxford he decided to become a Navy SEAL. Did that, went through BUD/S training, became a Navy SEAL, actually did combat, earned the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star and after that he’s continue his work with the humanitarian aid teaching people how to be leaders. He wrote a book about his experience as a humanitarian and as a Navy SEAL, it’s called The Heart and the Fist. His latest book is called Resilience.

Now I’m going to say right here it’s the best book I’ve read so far this year and I think it’s going to be the best book I’ve read in 2015. Hands down, one of my all-time favorite books. What it is, it’s a book that’s inspired by the letters that he wrote to a Navy SEAL bud who was going through a hard time and it’s all about becoming more resilient in life. Eric combines philosophy from Aristotle, Thucydides, modern psychology and his own experience as a Navy SEAL and lays out a philosophy of resilience. I’ve read a lot about resilience, studied a lot about resilience and this is by far the best book I’ve read about the topic. Eric and I are going to talk about resilience, what it means, how to develop it. Fascinating discussion. So let’s do this.

All right, Eric Greitens, welcome to the show.

Eric Greitens: Hey Brett, great to be on with you, a real pleasure to be with you.

Brett McKay: So before we get into your latest book Resilience, let’s talk a little about your background because it’s really fascinating. So you started out as a humanitarian, doing humanitarian work in Africa but then you became a Navy SEAL. Those things seem like diametrically opposed but you make the case in your book The Heart and the Fist that they’re actually very compatible. Can you explain how you went from humanitarian to Navy SEAL and how you see those fitting together in your mission?

Eric Greitens: Yeah, of course Brett. You’re right. I did a lot of humanitarian work before I joined the military. I’d worked in Bosnia with refugee children. I worked in Rwanda with kids who’d been orphaned and abused who were survivors of the genocide, worked in Cambodia with kids who’d lost limbs to land mines, kids who were survivors of polio. I remember actually there was one time I was in Bosnia and as you and the folks who are listening to our podcast will remember the horrible campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the 1990’s. I was 20 years old at the time, working in a refugee camp and I sat down with this guy and he said to me, he said, “You know what,” he said, “I appreciate that you’re here.” He said, “Please understand, I appreciate that you’re here. I’m glad that there’s a roof over my head. I appreciate that the international humanitarian community’s provided food for my family, that there’s a little kindergarten for my kids to go to school.” He said, “But, if people really cared about us, they’d be willing to help to protect us.” I didn’t know what to say to him at the time Brett.

I was 20 years old, sitting in this refugee camp but I realized later that what he said was true, that if you really love anything, if you really care about anything, you’re willing to respond not only with compassion but you’re willing to respond with courage. That you have to be willing to stand up and protect those things that you care about and protect the people that you care about. I believe that you have to live a life that involves both courage and compassion. I think that without courage your compassion falters. It’s courage that really makes your compassion meaningful. At the same time that without compassion, courage doesn’t really have any direction. You’ve got to have that compassion that provides direction for your courage. So after I joined the military relatively late, I was 26 years old. I’d finished a dissertation, writing about how international humanitarian organizations worked with kids in war zones and then I made this transition from the academic world to officer candidate school and to the SEAL teams. It was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

Brett McKay: Yeah, for those of you who don’t know, you’re a Rhodes scholar as well, right, that’s part of your career.

Eric Greitens: I was. I had a great time at Oxford, got a wonderful, wonderful education there.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean I think you wrote that in order to be good you have to be strong and then in order to be strong you have to be good.

Eric Greitens: That’s exactly right. I think that, and men know this instinctively, right? We know that there is a real power that comes when we’re living for a purpose that’s larger than ourselves. There’s a strength that comes from having compassion, from having friends who we care about, that those things actually make us stronger when we’re good. We also recognize that in order to do things well, that care for people, that provide for people you have to have some strength and you got to find ways to bring that strength and goodness, that courage and compassion together to really live a full life.

Brett McKay: So yeah, if you haven’t read his book, The Heart and the Fist, go check it out. It’s a great read. Let’s talk about your most recent book, Resilience. Can you tell me the story how that book came to be?

Eric Greitens: Yeah, so I was driving home. I’m in the middle of Missouri. I’m on Highway 70 heading from Columbia, Missouri back home and I looked down and my phone is ringing. It was my friend Zach Walker. Zach is a guy who had been through BUD/S training with me, BUD/S is the Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training, the basic Navy SEAL training. A really good friend of mine but the kind of guy who you have a real intense experience like that, you’re great friends, then you stay in touch maybe once a year. When I saw him calling Brett I actually I thought it was going to be bad news. I thought he was going to call and tell me that another one of our friends from our BUD/S class had died. I answered the phone and it turned out not to be that. Now you got to understand a little bit about who Zach Walker was. This is a kid from a northern California logging family and a tough guy. Like even in a BUD/S class of people who’re all trying to be Navy SEALS, Zach Walker was one of the toughest.

We’d been through training together and after that he went to the East Coast SEAL teams, I stayed on the West Coast. He told me what had happened. He went to Afghanistan, did a deployment and came home as this kind of Navy SEAL war hero. He’d done his service over there, came home and then he bought a concrete pumper. Started a small business, taking care of his family. He had two young kids at the time. Then Brett, his life was just hammered by hardship. His brother died. He lost his business and pulls into his driveway one night, gets out of his truck and drops to the ground because he thinks there’s a sniper watching him. He lays there for hours until the sun goes down and then he gets up and runs into his house and he realizes, man I’ve got post traumatic stress disorder. He starts drinking and Zach never did anything in moderation so it’s not a case but a cooler full of beer that he’s working through on the weekend. He called me after he’s been arrested.

So you’ve got a guy who’s a Navy SEAL war hero, small business owner, taking care of his family who goes down then to being an unemployed, alcoholic on disability, who’s looking at the possibility of having his kids come to visit him in jail. We talked for a while and then that night I got home and I started writing him a letter about what it takes to build resilience. I drew from my experience not just in the SEAL team training but doing that humanitarian work, working with veterans who’d come home. He wrote back to me and the book is a series of 23 letters to my friend Zach Walker who I love and was going through a tough time.

Brett McKay: What I loved about that format, because it is they’re letters that you, to your friend Walker, is that it felt like you were talking to the reader. I knew you were talking to your friend but it felt like when I was reading, I was like man he’s talking to me. That’s what I loved about that format. It was very personable.

Eric Greitens: Well thanks a lot. We’ve had a lot of folks who’ve said that to us and I think that is one of the really nice things about the letter format is that everybody can read this and everybody has to deal with pain in their life. Everybody has to deal with hardship and you can really take this, it’s very practical advice that I was giving to a friend. The you in the book is often, you know the readers say, “Hey, this guy is, he’s talking right to me.”

Brett McKay: You bring up a real interesting point. Your friend, he was a Navy SEAL. He saw some terrible stuff and he was tough.

Eric Greitens: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But then you see people where they’re put in different context and they become unresilient. Even though you think, wow, you were resilient in this situation. Why doesn’t resilience translate over to civilian life, where you don’t have to, you know, checking your six all the time? Is it possible to have uneven resilience or uneven courage?

Eric Greitens: Yeah, I think it absolutely is Brett. I think you’ve hit on something that’s really important and I do think that people have uneven courage. We all have uneven courage. I have uneven courage. You have uneven courage. Zach has uneven courage and the reason why is that you build courage through the practice of facing fear. So while you can learn to face fear very comfortably in one context you can still act cowardly in another. I saw this a lot in my work with veteran’s. You work with people who everyday got up. They put on body armor, check a radio, load a rifle, step into a Humvee. Drive into the streets of a place like Fallujah, Iraq. Kick down a door behind which they believe there are Al-Qaeda terrorists and then they come home and maybe they’ve been burned or they’ve lost a limb and they’re afraid to go to the mall because they’re afraid of what kids might say.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Eric Greitens: So you do find we all have uneven courage. There is something that I actually learned, a good story from a time when I was boxing. I knew a guy who had once been a trainer to one of the heavyweight champions of the world and he told me this story. He said that one day the heavyweight champion of the world calls him on the phone and says, “Hey man. Hey, I need you to help me. I need you to talk to somebody for me.” The trainer says, “What is it? What do you need me to do?” The heavyweight champion of the world says, “There’s this guy, he’s in the other room and I’m going to take the phone in and you got to talk to him for me.” The trainer says, “Well who do you need me to talk to?” The heavyweight champion of the world says to him, he says, “Man, it’s my gardener.” The trainer says, “Well why do you need me to talk to your gardener?” The heavyweight champ says, “Well, he’s got this bill and he’s trying to overcharge me.”

The trainer said to me, he said, “Eric, this is one of the reasons why so many of these men are taken advantage of once they become champions.” He said, “They’ve had all of this training in how you confront one kind of fear and no one would question their physical courage in the ring and yet they’ve never learned how you confront somebody over an emotional issue, a social issue, a financial issue. Then they become champions and they’re hit by all of these issues and they’re often beset by fear.” I think it’s very true. We all have uneven courage and I think the promise of, what I hope is the promise of the Resilience book is it gives everbody, points us in a direction to show us how we can start to build that courage in our lives.

Brett McKay: How do you define resilience? Because we’ve written about it before on the site. We’ve interviewed other guests who’ve talked about resilience. Do you define it as bouncing back or is it something else?

Eric Greitens: I think it’s something else Brett. I think that resilience is the virtue that enables us to move through hardship and become better. That’s how I define it. It’s the virtue that enables you to move through hardship and become better. I’ll tell you why I don’t think of it as bouncing back. You may know, but resilience, our use of the word resilience actually comes to us from physics. So in physics there’s this principle of elasticity and the basic idea is that you hit an object with compressive stress and resilience is the measure of how quickly that object can return to it’s prior state after it’s been hit by an outside force.

So that’s what we’ve taken, that idea of resilience and we’ve applied it to human beings and we tell people, you should just bounce back. Bounce back, bounce back. I actually believe human beings can’t bounce back. The reason why you can’t bounce back is because you can’t go back in time. So the 19 year old Marine who leaves for Afghanistan is never going to be 19 again. Parents who lose a child are never going to be the same parents again. The entrepreneur whose business goes bankrupt is never going to be the same entrepreneur again. So what resilient people are able to do is not to bounce back from hardship but they’re able to integrate hard experiences into their lives in such a way that they become better. That’s what I think is really at the heart of resilience.

Brett McKay: Do you think, and I’ve asked this question too. I look back at my own ancestors and they crossed the plains with handcarts. Buried children, buried wives, buried husbands and they just seemed really tough. Now, I look at myself and there’s situations where I’m like that boxer. I’m like, oh gosh, I got to talk to this guy who’s overcharging me and that kind of freaks me out. Do you think our modern culture, sort of our comforts, make us less resilient because we don’t have opportunities to practice all that often?

Eric Greitens: I definitely think that cultures in the past had to live harder lives. It’s one of the reasons why so much of the wisdom about resilience that’s in the book is ancient wisdom. That’s because two thousand years ago if your friend who was 22 years old got a toothache they might die. The odds of your children living past the age of 7 were slim. People had to deal with starvation. They had to deal with drought. They had to deal with disease and hardship in a way that for many of us can’t even fathom today. So what’s powerful I think is when you look back you see that there is all of this ancient wisdom about how to deal with hardship and what I’ve tried to do in Resilience is to make a lot of that wisdom really accessible to people so that you can see how or what people learned in the past can be applied to your life today.

Brett McKay: So throughout the book, each letter has a topic. I guess that’s sort of a component of resilience. I know you can’t go through exhaustively all of them but what are some of the big components of resilience and how do you go about developing these?

Eric Greitens: I think big picture, I’d say, in terms of how you develop resilience, it’s the same like the way you develop any virtue. It’s like courage, it’s like compassion, it’s like humility. You develop a virtue by practicing it. If you want to be courageous you act with courage. If you want to be compassionate you act with compassion.

Brett McKay: That’s a very Aristotelian approach.

Eric Greitens: Yes, yes exactly. It’s a very Aristotelian. What’s great about it too Brett is that it’s so hopeful because what it says to you is that you do not have to be the person that you are today. If you want to be someone else, if you want to change your character, if you start acting in a certain way you can literally shape and build your own character by with the right intention followed by the right actions. That’s what’s really hopeful about this. Some of the pieces that we talk about in Resilience is that people are much more resilient when they have a purpose, when they have a why. One of the things that I quote in the book is a philosopher who said that if you have the right why you can make it through any how.

A lot of times when people are in a place where they’re dealing with hardship and change and challenge and chaos and confusion, they’re overwhelmed by how. They’re trying to think how am I going to support my family? How am I going to deal with this? If people have the right why, if they know I have to do this because my family needs me, because my community needs me, because my friends need me. That why actually makes people much more powerful. I talk for example about how you build that sense of purpose. Also people who are resilient find ways to take responsibility, even in situations where lots of things are out of their control they find ways to take responsibility for what they can be responsible for. As you know, there are other chapters about how you find a model for yourself, how you build mentors into your life, how you build mental toughness. All of those different pieces actually go into helping us to live resilient lives.

Brett McKay: On thing that struck me as I read this book, and a lot of the books that I’ve read about resilience that I think misses is that I think Americans often think of this idea of resilience, that you’ll achieve it and then once you’re there, you’re good to go. It doesn’t matter, whatever comes you’ve achieved resilience, so you’re good. Reading your book sounds like it is a continual thing, some days you’ll be more resilient and then other days you might be less but you have to keep working at it.

Eric Greitens: Yeah, that’s exactly right. This is a practice that you build into your life. Just like being humble or being courageous or being compassionate, it’s not like you get to say, “You know what, I achieved courage two years ago and now I don’t have to act with courage anymore. The virtues manifest themselves by what we do in the world and so if you’re going to be resilient you have to be resilient every day. What’s fortunate is that life provides us with all of these different opportunities to learn and to grow and to build our character every day.

Brett McKay: So you have to be process oriented not outcome oriented?

Eric Greitens: Absolutely, absolutely. Now that doesn’t meant that you don’t have a set of goals and you push yourself and you challenge yourself towards that but what it does mean is that you recognize that the process of building a virtue is something that’s never complete. You never get to say, “I’m resilient now. I’m done. I’ve finished the course. We all, everyday, have to build resilience. Even for me what was fun Brett about writing the book was that it actually made me reflect on my own life and I think helped me to build resilience in my own life.

Brett McKay: So you went back to that idea about taking responsibility as an important part of … You mentioned something that really stuck out to me was this … oftentimes we live in a society that has that we have a morality of intentions. That oh, you know, like, I want to do that but then you really don’t do anything. Can you explain what you meant by a morality of intentions and how does that make a culture or a person less resilient?

Eric Greitens: So what happens a lot today Brett, is that I think there are two ways of thinking about morality. You think of either a morality of intentions or a morality of results. The morality of intention says that we get to measure our goodness in terms of what we hope to accomplish rather that what we actually accomplish. It tells us that our thoughts and feelings count for something in their own right. It’s an appealing philosophy for people who exist or want to exist in a world of pure thought and feeling but it can actually be a very selfish kind of morality.

I think one of the examples used in the book as I was writing this to Zach is I said, “Look Zach.” I said, “Think about somebody who decides that they want to tutor a third grader. They’re going to go after school, they’re going to tutor a third grader who’s having trouble, where they’re going to teach them how to read. Right now our society starts applauding for that person because they’ve got the right intentions. It’s certainly nice if they want to show up everyday but what I say is it’s wrong to go those lessons unprepared and incapable of doing real good. Why? Because you’d waste that child’s time and you’d stand in the way of the help that she really needs. From the perspective of an intentions the volunteer can pat himself or herself on the back but from the perspective of results that volunteer’s actually making a contribution to the child’s illiteracy. The reason why it’s so important to have a morality of results if you want to be resilient is that you have to actually look at the results that the world is showing you.

Brett McKay: Okay, oh, go ahead.

Eric Greitens:  Yeah, yeah, no, no, please.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean sort of related to that and this is sort of a common theme throughout, sort of related to this idea of wanting to live in the world of feelings. A lot of your advice to your friend was action oriented.

Eric Greitens: Yes.

Brett McKay: I think oftentimes in society we have this idea that if you feel it and then you’ll do it, what you feel, but you actually propose it’s actually different. If you want to feel a certain way you need to do those things that will make you feel that way. Is that right?

Eric Greitens: That’s exactly, exactly. That’s actually, you know and this is key to actually understanding how we create happiness in our lives and how we build joy. One of the things I said to Zach, you know we’re having this discussion one time and he was telling me about how he was feeling bad in the morning and then he was feeling better and then he was feeling bad and how his doctors were asking him how he’s feeling and his wife was asking how he’s feeling. I said, “What matters right now is not how you were feeling. It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s not that I don’t care about you but that’s not what’s most important right now. Our culture sometimes puts people in a trap where we first ask them how they’re feeling. It’s the first question. Hey, how you feeling? How you doing? How you feeling? What happens then is that people begin to think, well if I’m feeling a certain way then I should do something. I should act a certain way. Then what happens of course is that they act a certain way and if you act a certain way repeatedly you actually build you’re identity that way.

What I said to Zach is you actually have to flip that and the first question you ask yourself is, who am I and who do I want to be? If you say, and the answer to that question might be a I want to be a good father, might be I want to be a good boss. The answer to that question might be I want to be a good athlete. Now lots of different questions but the first question you ask yourself is who do I want to be and then if I want to be that kind of person. Well therefore I must do these things to be that person. Then what you find, and this is the magic piece, is that the way that you act will shape the way that you feel. We all know this at a really basic level. Right? If you get two hours of sleep you feel different than if you get eight hours of sleep. If you eat healthy you feel different than if you don’t eat healthy. Our culture sometimes puts this primacy on feelings where if we really want to be resilient we first have to think about our identity.

Brett McKay: Okay and just tell me, what can you do if you see someone who’s struggling like your friend? What’s the best approach to help them? Do you not ask them about their feelings or do you say, “Hey, let’s go do something?” How do you put that into practice if you’re trying to help someone who’s having a hard time?

Eric Greitens: There’s lots of different ways to put it into practice and I’ll mention just a few. First is to actually ask the question. Who do you want to be? A lot of times, you know, I asked Zach, like who do you want to be? I told him at one point, look you’ve got a choice here. You can either be the courageous Zach Walker who I knew when we were going through BUD/S or you can be the guy who doesn’t show up for the job interview because he’s afraid. So who do you want to be? So instead of starting with the feeling, oh, I’m feeling afraid you just ask the question, who do I want to be? Then oftentimes they end up answering their own question. Well that’s who I want to be so that’s what I need to do. You also raise a really good point Brett. Oftentimes instead of just asking people how they feel, when people start acting in a certain way they’ll start feeling in a different way. So you go out and you exercise with them. You go for a walk with them. You go out and you do a service project together in the community. What happens is all the sudden as people start acting in that way they actually start feeling a different way and you can really help your friends when you help pull them into the right kind of action with you.

Brett McKay: Well one thing I loved about your book is that you wove in all these different authors and thinkers from ancient times and even modern times. Were there any thinkers or philosophers or writers in particular that really spoke to the issue of resilience in a very articulate way, that influenced a lot of your thinking when you were writing to your friend?

Eric Greitens: There were a lot of different thinkers as you mentioned who I drew on and a few of them who were really solid who I’ll point to. There are for folks who pick up the book, I think there’s 150 some plus different sources-

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s awesome.

Eric Greitens:  … lots of places for people to go for further reading. One author who I really enjoyed was Edith Hamilton. Edith Hamilton wrote a book called The Greek Way. In the The Greek Way, she actually writes this wonderful chapter on Aeschylus. You and some of our listeners will remember, Aeschylus is often considered to be the father of tragedy. The person who really started writing tragedies. What was interesting was, was Aeschylus was also a soldier. He was a soldier who’d lived a hard life and he knew what it took to move through pain and create wisdom, what it took to move through suffering and create strength. I think that everbody would benefit from reading Edith Hamilton’s book. I think, you mentioned earlier when we were talking Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, excellent book there, really gives people a solid sense for how Aristotle and others thought about virtue and how it’s created.

Brett McKay: It’s a hard read. It’s super dense.

Eric Greitens: It’s a tough, dense read. Yes, we should warn people ahead of time. That’s a tough read. You can bite it off in small chunks. One of the things I’d also say in terms of reading, like where I’d direct people is I’d say, if you’re really thinking about how you build resilience in your life, one of the best things that you can do for yourself is to read a really good biography because what a really good biography will always show you is that great people suffered. Every great person who did anything worthwhile has suffered. Every great person has had to endure critics and criticism. Always in a really good biography you’ll see how that person actually put all of these different pieces of their life together to actually create something meaningful. I’d encourage people as their thinking about reading to also think about picking up a really good biography to understand how somebody else managed to build this kind of resilience in their life.

Brett McKay: Well I’m curious about this. You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. From your own life, are there examples when you showed resilience or unresilience and what did you take away from those personal experiences of yours?

Eric Greitens: Yeah of course there are. Look, I think one of the nice things about reflecting on your life and even writing this book for me is it helps you to reflect on all of these different places where you were courageous and where you weren’t. Where you were compassionate and where you could have been more so. Where you were resilient and where you weren’t. I think what’s also nice about resilience I’ll say, is that there are a lot of virtues that you see, like they happen in a moment. So somebody’s either courageous or cowardly in a particular moment. What’s interesting about the virtue of resilience is that we see it manifest over time so you can go back and look at your life always and say you know what, I really learned something or I haven’t yet learned the lesson that I needed to learn from that experience.

One of the things that I write about in the book, that was really hard for me, one of the hardest points in my life, was when I got divorced. I felt ashamed. I felt like I had let people down. This was one of those places of my life where I remember I’d come home, I was a Navy SEAL at the time. I’d come home, I’d get in bed and it was hard to get out. What that did for me though was that over time it really helped me build an empathy that even after having done all of that humanitarian work and working with kids and families and tough situations, I think personally experiencing that kind of hardship really helped build an empathy that I hope has made me a better leader and a better friend.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well Eric where can people find out more about your book?

Eric Greitens: Well Brett, the book is available. Certainly we’d invite everbody to come out to ericgreitens.com. It’s just E-R-I-C-G-R-E-I-T-E-N-S.com. You can go out to the website there. Also it’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. People can go out to their local bookstores and at all those places they’ll be able to learn more about Resilience.

Brett McKay: Fantastic, well, Eric Greitens, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Eric Greitens: Brett, it’s my pleasure. Honor to be on with you. Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: Our guest today was Eric Greitens. He’s the author of the book Resilience: Hard Won Wisdom for Leading a Better Life. It’s available on Amazon.com. Do yourself a favor, go pick up a copy. Like I said, the best book I’ve read in a long time. I’m going to reread it again here in a bit. I’d love to hear what you think about it. Tweet me @artofmanliness. Leave a comment on the podcast. You share any tidbits that you enjoyed from it. Go get it. Fantastic read. You can also find out more information about Eric’s work at ericgreitens.com.

Well that wraps up another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. A great way you can show your support for the podcast or for the website is stopping by the Art of Manliness store, store.artofmanliness.com. We’re actually having a sale on all our apparel right now, 30% off all tee shirts. We also have a hat from Ebbets Field Flannel that’s there. Again, 30% off, pick one up. Got some other stuff in there, coffee mugs, Benjamin Franklin journal, lapel pins, tie bars, you name it, we got it. Store.artofmanliness.com, your purchases will support the podcast as well as the content we do on the site. I’d really appreciate it. Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.