The 10 principles for success in life I learnt in the Navy
William Mcraven tells Harriet Alexander why he’s drawn up a life guide based on 10 principles he learnt in his career
‘They are universal lessons, even for someone who has never spent a day in the military’
It is scarcely 7am in Austin, Texas, yet already William Mcraven, a retired admiral with the US Navy, is up, breakfasted and – most important of all – his bed is made. “Every day, someone comes up to me and says: ‘I made my bed’.” He chuckles, as it’s the central piece of advice in his book, Make Your
Bed, a slender tome of life lessons learnt during 37 years as a Navy Seal.
The 61-year-old knows the importance of seemingly small personal disciplines, and how learning to do what he calls “the little things” well can have a positive effect on your life and career. Prior to his retirement in 2014, Mcraven served as a task unit commander under George HW Bush, was a naval special warfare group commander under Bill Clinton, the deputy national security adviser for George Wbush, and the head of all special forces under Barack Obama.
Looking back over a rich military life – he oversaw the special forces raids that captured both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden – he has drawn up a list of 10 practical life-changing principles and brought each of them to life with a personal anecdote, in a book that has already been a number one bestseller in the United States.
“Many times during my career I encountered life-threatening incidents,” he says. “They are universal lessons, even for someone who has never spent a day in the military.”
Under “universal lessons”, he files experiences that include “mid-air collisions in another parachute, uncontrolled descent in a minisub, nearly falling hundreds of feet off an oil rig, getting trapped beneath a sinking boat, demolitions that exploded prematurely…” Perhaps one should expect nothing less from a man who, in 2001, survived a parachute jump that went horrifically wrong, leaving him with a broken back and pelvis.
At the start of his career, he endured unfathomably tough training – US Navy recruits are made to swim four miles at night in cold, choppy waters off the coast of California, in an area known for its great white sharks, and slog through freezing mud for hours, completing obstacle races with hands and feet swollen from the biting cold.
For those in the military, he writes, “life is hard, and sometimes there is little you can do to affect the outcome of your day. But sometimes the simple act of making your bed can give you the lift you need to start your day and provide you the satisfaction to end it right.” Start your day with a task completed, he reasons, “if you want to change your life and maybe the world”.
The day before we met, he received a letter from an 80-year-old with seven grandchildren who told him that on reading the book he had started making his bed. “So everyone can make changes – even people who think they are set in their ways.”
One of the most remarkable anecdotes Mcraven tells – which he uses to show how to stand up to workplace bullies – is how, in December 2003, he found himself having custody of Saddam Hussein, recently captured by the US special forces he commanded.
“As I opened the door to allow the new Iraqi government leaders into the room, Saddam remained seated,” he writes. “A smirk crossed his face, and there was no sign of remorse or submission in his attitude. Immediately, the four Iraqi leaders began to yell at Saddam, but from a safe distance. With a look of contempt, Saddam motioned them to sit down. Still fearful of the former dictator, they each took their seats.”
Mcraven watched as the dictator lectured the new leaders. After they left, the American then instructed staff that there would be no more visitors, and no one was to speak to Hussein. Instead, Mcraven would visit him daily, ostensibly to check on his medical condition. “Every day, Saddam rose to greet me, and every day, without speaking, I motioned him back to his cot. The message was clear. He was no longer important.” Tellingly, says Mcraven, the Iraqi dictator never made his bed.
Seemingly taking advice from his own book – the chapter entitled “You Can’t Go it Alone” perhaps, or “Only the Size of Your Heart Matters” – Mcraven has very publicly taken against Donald Trump. In February, after the president described the press as “the enemy of the people”, Mcraven made headlines when he responded by saying: “This sentiment may be the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime.”
A former White House insider, Mcraven says he can see some obvious problems with the Trump administration. “The staff that run the mechanics of the White House are immensely important. I was there from October 2001, under President Bush. He had only been in office eight months yet everything was running very smoothly. There were lots of old hands still in the national security council. They were professionals, and apolitical. Outwardly, it seems that with the current administration their inexperience is showing.”
He also detected a sense of chaos at the White House when Theresa May became the first world leader to visit Donald Trump: its press release spelt her name three different ways. “These sort of things do not happen in a well-orchestrated White House,” says Mcraven. He is also contemptuous of Trump’s insistence of personal loyalty.
Earlier this month, a video clip of Trump’s first cabinet meeting, in which he invited each member of his team to praise him one by one, went viral. Then, at a private dinner, Trump is said to have requested a pledge of loyalty from James Comey, the former FBI director he later fired; Comey refused to do so, and replied that the best he could offer was honesty. (“That’s what I want,” said Trump, with a whiff of desperation: “honest loyalty.”)
By sticking to his principles – those who work at the FBI pledge their loyalty to the US Constitution, not to any individual person – Comey, in Mcraven’s eyes, was following another rule in his book: “Don’t back down from the sharks.”
While he misses military life – particularly being around the soldiers – he says it is also important, every once in a while, to break a routine. “I love it when someone says: ‘Let’s go scuba diving. Let’s jump out of a plane’.” But only if he can then go home to a perfectly made bed.