- [Announcer] This program was funded by the following, Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and family, BP America, and also by, and by, a complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and livefromlbj.org.

(inspirational music) - [Presenter] The greatest national security threat we have right now is how poorly we are educating our kids in pre-K through 12th.

- [Presenter] We are reinforcing democracy.

We are the ones who get to choose our future.

- [Presenter] Democracy is a fragile thing.

It has to be defended, and it always has to be defended.

(inspirational music) (chiming music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our times.

Now, we bring those conversations straight to you.

In this series, we'll explore America in all its complexity, what our extraordinary but often tempestuous history says about who we are as a people and the formidable challenges we face today.

Few leaders have been tested as much as our guest, Admiral William McRaven, who began his military career as a Navy SEAL and would go on to lead the US Special Operations Command, which planned the raid that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Tonight, he offers some advice on leadership that he gleaned from his years in the military, and that appears in his latest bestselling book, "The Wisdom of the Bullfrog."

Bill McRaven, welcome.

- Well, thanks, Mark.

Good to be with you.

- Well, the title of your book is "The Wisdom of the Bullfrog."

What is the significance of the bullfrog?

- So the bullfrog, the title bullfrog is given to the longest serving Navy SEAL on active duty.

So back in 2011, I was given the title, 'cause at that point in time, I'd been in the SEAL team for about 34 years, and they give you this kind of godawful trophy (Mark chuckles) that has got this ugly toad on top of it.

And I think part of it is, okay, you're the bullfrog, but don't get too full of yourself.

Don't take it too seriously.

But of course, the title really is about 37 years of leadership experience and hopefully some lessons that I learned from those 37 years.

- Did you expect to be the bullfrog?

- Oh gosh, no.

You know, I think I expected to last about four years, because when I came in, in 1977, there really wasn't a career for Navy SEALs.

You know, if you made Navy Lieutenant, if you spent, you know, six years in the SEAL teams, that was probably a pretty good run for you.

And then you were gonna go off and do other things.

But frankly, as the time went on, I really enjoyed what I was doing.

We kind of constantly had these adventures every couple of years.

And before long, all of a sudden, I was pretty senior.

- The book is comprised of 18 mottoes and phrases that you write in the book have storied histories that drove leaders, at times, to make certain profound decisions.

One of those mottoes is "When in command, command."

- Right.

- And you write in the chapter, "As a leader, you must be in command, even on those days when you struggle with the pressures of the job.

You can't have a bad day.

You must never look beaten, no matter what the circumstances."

So easier said than done (laughs), during the most difficult times in your leadership, how did you adhere to that motto?

- Yeah, well, let me take the listener the, through a bit of why the motto is what it is.

So actually, when I was here at the University of Texas, the chapter starts off, and I'm a young midshipman and the Navy Lieutenant who was teaching a course on naval history, starts talking about Chester Nimitz, Admiral Chester Nimitz, who is, as you well know, was born and raised in Fredericksburg, not too far from here.

And Nimitz, at one point in time, in 1942, is having to make this very, very difficult decision about whether or not he will engage the Japanese fleet off this little island in the Pacific called Midway.

And he struggles with this decision, and a lot of his contemporaries, his staff and the people in Washington are convincing him that this is not a good idea.

So he goes to see Admiral Bull Halsey, one of his closest friends who happens to be in the hospital, and he's telling Halsey about this dilemma he has.

And that's when, at least, you know, legend has it, that Halsey turned to him and said, "Admiral, you used to always tell me, when in command, command."

And to your point, Nark, it really is about, look, when you're in command, you've got to be prepared to make the tough decisions.

The men and women that work for you, that serve for you, expect you as a leader to make tough decisions.

To your question though, you know, when I say, you can never have a bad day, of course leaders all, we all have bad days.

We have bad days as the heads of our household.

We have bad days, you know, when we're in charge of military folks, in the corporate world.

You're gonna have a bad day.

But you have to recognize that, as a leader, your responsibility to the men and women that work for you is to show them that you've got a plan, is to lead them through the tough days, to lead them through the bad days.

And the way you do that is you have to, you know, throw your shoulders back.

Your head's gotta be erect.

You've gotta be, you know, looking straight at 'em.

You've got to look like you've got a plan, even if on those days, you're struggling.

Because if you struggle, it will spread like wildfire through the organization, and the entire organization will struggle.

So on those bad days, my understanding always was this is not the time to look beaten.

This is the time they need your leadership.

You need to show up, and when in command, command.

- So how do you summon that ability, subordinating your own emotions at times in order to reflect the confidence of a leader?

- Because as a leader, you know it's an honor to be in a leadership position.

And we talk about in the military this energy of command.

And I heard that term early on in my career.

You know, when you're in command, you get the energy of command.

And I'm not sure I really appreciated what it was until I had an opportunity to command.

And those days when everybody else is really kind of beaten down because of something that's going on, you, as the leader, you seem to gain energy.

And it is kind of this sixth sense that you have.

It's a sixth quality that kind of comes into you that says, I'm in charge.

I'm the leader.

People expect me to be out there.

They expect me to lead.

And if you understand your position is to make everybody better, that they're looking to you?

That helps motivate you and inspire you.

It gives you the energy of command.

- It's, you can summon that energy.

- You can.

- By understanding the responsibility that you have, yeah.

- Absolutely correct.

- One of the other mottoes that you write about in the book is run toward the sound of guns.

And to illustrate the lesson, you write about Joshua Chamberlain.

- Right.

- Who played a vital role in the Civil War, talk about Joshua Chamberlain and how he illustrates that lesson.

- Yeah, so when you think of, you know, the Civil War, so this, the story starts off and it's July, 1862.

And the Union forces have just come to this small town in Pennsylvania called Gettysburg.

And they array their forces along what is called Cemetery Ridge.

Well, the next day, the Confederates show up and Meade and his forces have aligned along Cemetery Ridge.

And at the far end, of course, is Little Round Top where Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine have positioned themselves.

Make a long story short, at one point in time, one of Meade's subordinates, Gary, pulls the forces into the center 'cause then, from a military tactical standpoint, you can't break the center.

If you break the center, then the enemy's gonna win.

And at one point in time, Hood understands that he's gotta break the center.

But as he sees the bulk of the forces coming from the left flank to the center, he realizes he has an opportunity.

So he marshals his forces.

You know, some say three to four to one against the 20th Maine.

The rebels begin to storm the hill.

And Joshua Chamberlain, who has already been wounded, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, in charge of the 20th Maine, realizes this is the time for him to take the leadership role to, you know, unsheathe his sword, fix his bayonet, and charge down the hill, leading the charge against the Confederates.

And that changes the day.

He wins and saves Little Round Top.

And the point I make in the book is a couple of things.

One, you think about Chamberlain.

He saves Little Round Top, which probably saved Cemetery Ridge that day, which saved the Battle of Gettysburg, which saved the Union, which saved the country, which saved the world, because of one man's action to kind of move to the front.

And the idea of, you know, run to the sound of guns is, when you're a leader, you have to move to where the problem is.

In this case, as generals know, when you hear the sound of guns, that's where you position yourself.

But it tells the leaders, look, when there's a problem, you don't move away from it.

You're the leader.

Move towards it.

But so many leaders don't wanna do that, because they know, in moving towards the problem, that they get painted with the same brush.

And they're like, well, if I move there and I try to solve that and it doesn't go well, it will reflect on me.

Well, guess what?

You're the leader.

You have to move to that position, try to solve that problem.

- And that's certainly true in corporate leadership, as you talk about in the book as well.

- Absolutely.

- Exxon Valdez was a good example of a leader not running, - Right, right.

- Toward the sound of guns.

Another chapter in the book is titled, "Always Have a Swim Buddy."

- Right.

- What is the importance of a swim buddy in naval training?

- Yeah, so when you go through SEAL training, one of the first rules is that, you know, you're never alone.

In other words, when you're in the water, you literally are hooked up by a short rope to your swim buddy.

Because most of the missions we do in both training and combat, you are under a ship, it's dark, you can't see anything, you're obviously not gonna be flashing light in enemy territory.

And your swim buddy is that person in SEAL training that's gonna take care of you underwater.

Your swim buddy becomes this kind of term of art, if you will, for your partner, your partner in the SEAL teams, but it's also your partner in life, your partner in the corporate world.

Your partner in whatever challenging endeavor you might have, you know you have to have somebody there that you can rely on, somebody that you implicitly trust.

And earlier you asked me about, you know, leaders can't have a bad day.

And my point is, not in public.

You know, when they're facing the employees, when they're facing the rank and file, they cannot appear to have had a bad day.

But when you're alone in your office, when you're having to deal with the problems of the corporate world or any place else, you need somebody you can confide in.

And this is the idea behind the swim buddy for the business leaders.

Find somebody you can confide in.

Find somebody you trust implicitly.

Be prepared to kinda share your concerns and be prepared to take their criticism, their tough love, their whatever comes with that relationship, because it'll make you a better leader.

- There are only about a quarter of those who go through Naval SEAL training actually make it through.

- Right.

- Generally speaking, Bill, what's the difference between those who make it and those that, what are the qualities that help to ensure that somebody is actually gonna make it through the training?

- Yeah, there's only one quality that sets everybody else apart, and that's that they didn't quit.

So, you know, it's, people always think it's the biggest, the strongest, the fastest.

Interestingly enough, it is rarely the biggest, the strongest, the fastest SEAL that makes it through training.

And in fact, we have a little bit of a, you know, "Sports Illustrated" curse, if you will.

At the beginning of every class, you know, we picked the guy most likely to succeed sort of thing.

(Mark chuckles) That didn't turn out well in my class.

It generally doesn't turn out well in other classes, but what you find is the guys that make it through, sometimes, are the guys that you least expected to make it through, but what you didn't find out was kind of what's in here.

Nobody quits.

We all, the one thing we all have in common is not our size, not our ethnicity, not our race.

None of us quit.

That's why we're SEALs.

And the reason that's important is not just about SEAL training.

It's, as you go through your military career as a Navy SEAL, you'll have a thousand opportunities to quit.

You know, the military kind of moves you about every two years.

Well, that gets hard on your family after a while.

You're deployed kind of constantly.

Certainly, after 9/11, the guys are deployed in a war zone.

There's all these opportunities to quit, quit on a mission, quit on your friends, quit on your family, quit on life.

The one thing that will set you apart is that you made the decision, I'm not gonna quit.

And those are the kind of people we need in the SEAL teams.

- Is that generally psychological, emotional, mental, physical?

What's driving that principle?

- I think it's probably all of the above, but you know, more than anything else, it is mental.

It's about being mentally tough.

Now, it helps to be physically strong.

It helps to be, you know, to find whatever drives you, whether that's a, you know, a spiritual summoning up, which, you know, you see a lot of guys that come into the SEAL training that have great faith, and they rely on that in difficult times.

You find those that, you know, are just, you know, tough by design, but it is generally mental, because no single event in SEAL training is so hard that anybody can't make it through.

It's just that when you do them back to back to back to back every day, and you realize that you've gotta do this for six months for basic training, and instructors who are, you know, crusty old, you know, veterans are gonna be pushing you hard, it's easy to quit.

- How do you train yourself for mental toughness?

- Yeah, I think you've got to put, you've gotta put the goal out there and tell yourself, what are you going to do to achieve that goal?

And for me, as crazy as it sounds, when I went through SEAL training, again, 1977, not a lot of books, not a lot of movies.

I really knew nothing about SEAL training when I went through in 1977.

But I knew that they were gonna have to darn near kill me to keep me from making it through.

And so mentally, I was prepared for the worst case scenario.

Now, of course, it's very well organized.

It's, it is, in general, very well supervised.

We have had a number of kind of high profile deaths in the last several years.

So it's not perfect.

It is tough training, but in my case, and I think in the case of a lot of these guys, they said, as long as I can mentally accept this, and you have to accept the parameters, then in my case, as long as they didn't kill me, well, guess what?

I could keep going.

Now, there were some days where I was, I was tested in that.

But everybody has their own frame of reference, I think, for getting through.

- It has been over a dozen years since you organized the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

- Right.

- Those were pretty high stakes.

What is the greatest leadership lesson that you derived through that experience?

- You know, I think what it was, was it was the culmination of, at that point in time, 34 years.

So I had been in the SEAL team for 34 years.

By that time, I'd seen just about everything there was to see in terms of combat and training missions and, you know, the risks.

So I knew going into it that we had to do a couple of fundamentals.

And it really was about the fundamentals.

As I know you're aware, Mark, back in the 1990s, I wrote a, my thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School on special operations.

And what I found was those that were successful really did all the hard planning, all the hard training.

They tried not to deviate too far from what they knew to be a simple approach to things.

So it was pulling all of these lessons I'd learned from 34 years and making sure that I didn't decide to get wild and crazy because I thought the stakes were so high.

For me, the fact that the stakes were so high meant I had to reduce the risk to the, you know, the best possible level.

That was gonna mean, plan, plan, plan and plan some more, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, and rehearse some more.

Make sure you have the right people that are doing this.

And I would say, if there was one thing, one lesson that I had learned many, many times over was make sure you trust the people that you are asking to lead the mission.

And I trusted the ground commander.

We had worked together for dozens of years.

I knew that he would be the right guy to do the mission, so I could frame the plan, and then of course, as the ground force commander, it was his job to really work out the details of the plan.

You know, John, you go left, Bob, you go right.

Here's how we're gonna do this.

And I relied on them to do their job.

- As I've talked to you and read about this mission, Bill, it seems it's distinctly American insofar as you not only achieved your goal of taking out Osama bin Laden, but you also ensured that those on the compound, those innocent people, women and children on the compound were kept safe.

And in so doing, the troops on that mission put themselves at risk.

- [Bill] Right.

- Talk a little bit about that aspect of the mission, as, and as it reflects our military and the American values that we bring to the missions that we undertake.

- Yeah, well, thanks for that question, because I think it is an important question.

You know, there is this, you know, misinformed belief out there that, you know, as SEALs, we are all steely-eyed killers and we don't care about, you know, doing anything more than taking care of the mission.

The mission is always important, but how you do the mission and whether you can come back with your dignity, the dignity and the reputation of your unit and, of course, the honor of the nation is very, very important.

So the men that went on this mission, they were fathers and sons and brothers.

All, most of them were married with kids.

So there was no way they were going to go on this mission and not do what was right by the women and children that were on the target, because they're human, because they're good human beings.

Now, that doesn't mean that they can't, you know, flip the trigger or flip the switch and be steely eyed killers when they need to be.

That is an important part of how we train them, is, yep, there are gonna be times when you need to go and do the nation's work.

And it is hard, and it is dirty, and it is really, really tough.

But then there are times when you need to flip that switch and make sure that you can also represent the nation in a way that is noble, that is honorable, that, when the mission is over, you can come back, hold your head high, and the nation can as well.

And they all understood that going into the mission - Bill, it's been almost a decade since you gave your iconic make your bed speech as a commencement address to the graduates of the University of Texas.

And we sit on the University of Texas grounds as we have this conversation.

How did that idea come to you?

- 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.

(chuckles) Yeah, well, so when the, when President Bill Powers asked me to be the commencement speaker, it was, I dunno, maybe three months before the commencement, and I had a day job.

I was running US Special Operations Command.

So I kind of mulled over a few ideas in my head as time went on.

And then, you know, a couple weeks before the commencement address, I started to write the speech.

And as you know, Mark, I write all my own speeches.

I like writing speeches.

And the Wednesday before I was supposed to give the speech, I had, you know, I had kind of framed it the way I thought, and I'd written most of the speech, but that Wednesday, I came down to my wife Georgeann, and I had the speech in my hand.

I said, "It doesn't work."

(Mark laughing) I mean, it's a good speech.

it's gotta have a beginning, a middle and an end.

It's gotta have some themes.

And I wasn't able to make my initial theme work.

And it was on that Wednesday, you know, she turned to me and she said, "Well, why don't you write about something you know?"

(laughs) And I said, "Look, the only thing I know is how to be a SEAL."

And she said, "Well, write about that."

And I remember thinking at the time, look, I'm about to go address, you know, 8,000 students and 25,000 parents.

I'm gonna be in uniform.

I don't know how this is gonna play on a university campus.

We'd had a couple of high profile government officials that had actually been asked not to come give a commencement address that year.

And I thought, you know, how are they gonna take it if I'm talking about SEAL training?

But I realized that Wednesday, that SEAL training, those six months, really are kind of a small microcosm of life.

And so I began to write the speech thinking that, well, look, I'm gonna talk about the lessons that I learned in SEAL training that I think, you know, permeate, you know, all of life no matter who you are.

And the reason I had make your bed first was that was the first thing that we started pretty much every day in SEAL training.

You had to get up.

You had to make sure you made your bed.

You invariably get inspected by the instructors.

And so this little act of making your bed, I realized, for the students, if I could impart to them that, look, the little things in life matter, and oh, by the way, if you start your day doing something that is small but meaningful and that you, you know, take some inspiration from, it'll encourage you to do another task and another.

And so then I just kind of chronologically built out the rest of the speech.

And then of course, the final lesson in the speech was don't ring the bell, because in SEAL training, we have this bell.

But to me, that was the end of SEAL training.

The only time we ever ring the bell is when we have actually completed SEAL training and we're given the opportunity to ring the bell as a sign of showing that we made it through, and now the bell can't beat us anymore.

So everything else was just a little bit of a chronology of SEAL training.

- Had you any idea when you were delivering that speech that it would have the power that it has?

- No.

In fact, I didn't understand how things worked at the time.

Remember, I'd been in the military, so I knew nothing about Twitter, and I knew nothing about social media because the nature of my job, I was not allowed to be on any of the social media.

And I remember, after the speech, we were heading back to the hotel, and I have a security detachment that's with me, a couple of great young soldiers.

And one of the young soldiers comes to me afterwards, he says, "Hey, sir, your speech is going viral."

(Mark chuckles) Well, I didn't know what that meant.

I mean, it sounds, crazy as it sounds, I didn't know what viral on Twitter meant.

And it was within, you know, an hour or so of the speech, it already had 40,000 hits.

And of course, I mean, today, it's over a hundred million or so.

I don't know.

I've kinda lost track.

- Absolutely remarkable.

You have been an influential leader to so many, but during your most difficult times, is there one leader in particular that you look to for inspiration?

- Yeah, you know, it's hard.

There isn't one leader.

When I was in the military, I was always actually inspired by the young men and women that worked for me.

And when you see their sacrifice, I mean, you know, I was a college graduate with a great wife and great kids, and I was making a decent salary.

You know, some of these young soldiers, I mean, they're, you know, E-4s, E-5s.

They're in combat.

Their wife and two children are at home trying to, you know, make a living while their husband or or wife is gone.

And you see these young men and women, and they are incredibly patriotic.

They are incredibly committed to the mission that you're trying to do.

And they come from all walks of life.

You know?

It's not just poor kids from the South.

It's rich kids, poor kids, Black, white, you name it.

And they're kind of what inspire you.

You know, back to the point about the energy of command, you're honored to be in command.

You draw your energy not from, you know, the clouds.

You draw the energy from the men and women that work for you because you know how you have an obligation to them.

So they're the leaders that inspired me always.

- The book is "The Wisdom of the Bullfrog," and our guest is the bullfrog himself, Admiral Bill McRaven.

Bill, thanks for being here, and thank you for your service to our nation.

- My pleasure, Mark.

Thanks.

(inspirational music) (inspirational music continues) - [Announcer] This program was funded by the following, Joni and Joe Latimer, Lynda Johnson Robb and family, BP America, and also by, and by, a complete list of funders is available at aptonline.org and livefromlbj.org.

(whistling theme music) (upbeat theme music)