Echelon Front (EF) is a leadership training organization led by retired Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Its training is based on leadership skills, principles, and practices that were developed in war by Willink and Babin and later adapted to address leadership challenges in the business world. EF's training serves leaders in a wide variety of domains including technology, construction, finance, and education. Moreover, EF teaches that leading others is inextricably tied to a demand for self-mastery, a kind of "leadership in oneself." This demand is embodied in the slogan "discipline equals freedom," which Willink is well known for, as well as the bodily training regiments, such as physical conditioning and Jiu-Jitsu classes, that accompany the speeches and leadership exercises at EF's events.
This article reviews EF's Extreme Ownership Muster event, which I attended last month in Nashville, Tennessee. Overall, it was an excellent and impactful event. The event transformed my understanding of what leadership is and instilled in me a genuine desire to become a leader. It provided a wealth of practical knowledge about leadership and presented it within a well thought out and tightly connected conceptual framework. Its teaching was interwoven with deeply personal and memorable stories of military struggle, sacrifice, and camaraderie. These stories served to enrich the event's conceptual teaching as well as to communicate the realities of war and the burden and pain left by fallen soldiers to a degree that I had not experienced before. The event itself was extremely well run and organized. The instructors were generous with their time and were genuinely interested in meeting attendees and learning about their specific leadership challenges. I think that this is an extremely worthwhile event that teams operating in any industry would benefit from attending. I believe that the event will help me advance my mission in business and that it will help me advance my most important mission, which is motivated by a deep concern for the fate of our nation.
The remainder of this article presents a detailed review of the event and an overview of its content. It is divided into three parts. First, I will discuss my motivations for attending the event and some questions that I had before the event. Second, I will discuss the content of the event in detail, including an overview of each of the speeches. Finally, I will reflect on the event and discuss how I think it will impact me and my mission going forward. I will also make some suggested additions to the event. (That is, the second section aims at a fairly objective description of the contents of the event and can be read on its own while the first and third sections relate heavily to my personal mission and would be of most interest to those similarly concerned about the fate of our nation.)
Motivations for Attending the EF Event
I attended the EF event for business, patriotic, and philosophical reasons.
I have been successfully freelancing for the past few years building AI, machine learning and data science software for startups and small businesses. I am currently in the process of expanding my efforts and building a team. I believed that EF's leadership training would help me learn the skills necessary to clarify my company's mission and to lead my growing team to success. I also thought that the conference would provide a good opportunity to meet other business leaders in the Nashville area, which I moved to about six months ago. My intention was to collaborate with them on technical and business projects as well as to build a community dedicated to improving our personal lives and leadership skills.
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During graduate school I witnessed the growth of a dangerous force within the university-which I will simply describe as aggressive censorship accompanied by passive support for political violence for the purposes of this article. I felt a profound sense of duty to fight and subdue this force and a strong sense of personal responsibility for failing to do so as it spilled out into and engulfed the nation in the late 2010's and early 2020's. EF's principle of extreme ownership, which I had understood as heaping upon oneself a complete, even if unreasonable, sense of responsibility for failure resonated with this sentiment that I felt. (Extreme ownership in fact has a distinct, but not entirely contrary, meaning as I learned at the conference.)
How could I have better led this fight? I had done so primarily by speaking out, attempting to galvanize and instill courage in others, forming and leading organizations, and sacrificing everything I could afford to do so. Moreover, how can I better step up now to lead America out of its continuing crisis? Right now there are many intelligent young people who are disenchanted with or have been effectively exiled from mainstream institutions. I believe that the essential mission and unique capability of this group is to clarify and understand the crisis at a deep and fundamental level, to chart a path forward, and to orient the nation along that path. However, right now, people comprising this group are only loosely connected, have not set a common practical mission, and are not effectively working with other Americans who are similarly concerned about the fate of our nation but have a distinct role to play in its revival. How can I lead efforts among this group and how can I build bridges with other groups of patriotic Americans?
In addition to helping me learn to lead efforts among this group, I believed that attending the EF event would provide essential insight into the current crisis for two reasons. The first has to do with its connection to Jocko Willink. I see Willink as a great American for his military service and for the work he's done to fortify the nation domestically. He has, through the Jocko Podcast and other mediums, advanced virtues like courage, discipline, and self-mastery that are severely lacking today and has additionally projected strong views on the purpose of life that counteract the apathy that dominates today. Moreover, he has done so with a unique spirit and intensity that has captivated many people and sincerely inspired them to better their lives. While I am not into celebrities, I felt that it would be an honor to meet Willink at the conference. Moreover, I believed that doing so would help me better understand what makes him so unique and what understanding of life and America animates him. I believed that such an understanding might provide essential insight into the nature of the current crisis and might reorient me on my mission in some fundamental way.
The second reason has to do with the event's connection to Jiu-Jitsu, which I began training about two years ago. Since I train Jiu-Jitsu, I was naturally interested in and curious about its inclusion in a leadership conference. What is the unifying force that holds together EF's seemingly disparate teachings on leadership, the cultivation of fortifying virtues, patriotism rooted in reverence for military sacrifice, and martial arts training? My curiosity in the unifying power of martial arts was amplified by an interview I had seen in which Willink said that "Jiu-Jitsu, for me, was the connective tissue that started to join my mind with all the different aspects of my life.... I don't think I would be doing anything that I'm doing right now [(presumably including leadership training)] if it wasn't for Jiu-Jitsu."
I felt that better understanding the scope of the benefits of martial arts would help me in my mission, part of which is devoted to an investigation into how martial arts training can help strengthen America. This will be the subject of a forthcoming article, but some questions that I am investigating are as follows. At a concrete level, can widespread martial arts training help citizens defend themselves, particularly against the rising political and criminal violence, and can it help develop fortifying virtues like courage and discipline? At a more experimental level, I am investigating the value of martial arts in two capacities. First, can martial arts training be used as a template for training citizens to defend and preserve freedom domestically by, for example, training them to engage in controversial debates, to overcome fear, and to tolerate social and professional repercussions for their speech? Moreover, is there an analogous art that accompanies this training, a kind of patriotic art whose aim is not physical self defense but rather a kind of national sociopolitical defense? Second, taking my bearing from the widely recognized mind-body connection inherent in martial arts, can martial arts shed light on the more general phenomenon of the relation between thinking and reality, or how thinking is fundamentally able to grasp and interface with reality? Firmly grasping this interface is, I believe, essential for deep and true political thinking which I see as necessary for overcoming the current crisis.
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After graduate school, I began an independent study of political philosophy in an attempt to understand the crisis at a deeper level. Within the political chaos, it seemed like nobody had any answers. Things kept unraveling, continually defying explanation and prediction, as well as any attempt to control them. The concepts that kept popping up to make sense of politics, like "woke" and "generation gap," and even ideas like the left-right political spectrum that are central to political discourse, always seemed to obscure, rather than to truly grasp, political reality. I found seemingly scientific approaches, such as statistical analyses, similarly insufficient, often veiling their inability to grasp political reality with the appearance of rigor. I found myself seeking a deeper and genuine understanding, sober and clear thinking, something more stable and permanent to latch onto. Political philosophy offered this promise. "Political philosophy is the attempt truly to know both the nature of political things and the right, or the good, political order," writes Leo Strauss (1899-1973) a preeminent twentieth-century political philosopher.
The quest for knowledge of the good political order inevitably leads us on a quest for a comprehensive understanding of human life, to questions about the essence of man and what it means to live a good life. Political philosophy thus takes us far beyond what we think of as "politics" today (typically policies, laws, elections, and accompanying debates). In so doing, it immediately confronts us with the question of how we are able to gain access to (or to properly pursue) political wisdom. The fact that this is not merely an intellectual matter has been demonstrated spectacularly by today's universities, within which the greatest political ignorance grew alongside the greatest severing of the intellect from the totality of human life.
Instead, our quest for political wisdom leads us to ask the following questions: what life experiences must we acquire in order to properly pursue this wisdom? How do we need to train our whole selves for this pursuit? Who among us has the best understanding of life and what can we learn by talking to and questioning him? It was this quest that attracted me to the EF event in which I saw important contrasts to the modern world: intimate experience with war, the focus on a holistic training of man (in virtues, patriotism, martial arts, business, and leadership), and a unique understanding of life that I suspect animates their teachings (which I had suggested above in reference to Willink's fame). I believed that attending the event would provide important insight into the nature of man, and hence insight into the good political order and the philosophical underpinnings of the current crisis.
I was further motivated to attend the event to investigate some similarities that I recognized between the teachings of EF and the ancient Greeks. Ancient Greek political philosophy furnishes us with a comprehensive view of politics that focuses on the cultivation of human excellence. It also furnishes us with a preeminent exemplar of the quest for political wisdom in the life of Socrates. Socrates, in Plato's Republic, teaches that the pursuit of wisdom demands education of the full human soul, which requires not only training one's intellect, but also training in music and gymnastic (physical fitness, wrestling, training for war), as well as the cultivation of virtues like courage (to confront painful things) and moderation (to resist indulgence in pleasure). I see the comprehensive nature of education and the promotion of virtues like courage and discipline echoed in EF's teaching. Is this connection genuine and does it run deeper? Does it indicate a kind of rediscovery of ancient ideals in the modern world? If so, is this rediscovery part of a wider cultural phenomenon, especially among those calling to cultivate virtues like courage to counteract the cowardice that dominates today?
I also saw in EF's leadership teaching echoes of more specific ancient teachings. To give one example, there seems to be a strong similarity between the notion of ruling presented by Socrates in Plato's Republic and the notion of leadership taught by EF. For Socrates, the notion of ruling is a kind of supreme principle, one necessary to understand the best political order, the proper order of the human soul, and the intimate relationship between the two. Socrates teaches that the city can not be freed from its ills unless it is ruled by the best men. The best man is the one whose soul is properly ordered, meaning that it is ruled by its best part, the part that pursues the highest aims of the soul. Similarly, EF raises leadership to a kind of supreme principle, one that governs the organization of a team as well as the organization of one's life, a kind of "leadership in oneself." As EF's event page states: "victory cannot be achieved without leadership, which is why we say leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, the most important thing in business, and the most important thing in life."
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Moreover, EF's leadership teaching was developed in response to the realities of war. Similarly, war figures heavily into Socrates' teaching in the Republic, where the constant threat of war is the central concern of the city that he develops in speech. Consequently, the city's need to properly educate and train its guardian, or warrior, class is the impetus that guides his entire political teaching. (Socrates himself was a respected veteran of war, receiving praise for his courage by two Athenian generals in Plato's Laches, for example.) Are certain political truths accessible only to those who intimately comprehend the realities of war, which most of the ancients (like Socrates) did and which most of EF's instructors do, but which most moderns do not? Does this modern alienation from war explain, in part, the modern alienation from political wisdom?