Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

sleep, when they get a chance to rest, SEAL operators must remain
vigilant and aware so that the enemy does not surprise them. Nothing is
easy. The temptation to take the easy road is always there. It is as easy as
staying in bed in the morning and sleeping in. But discipline is
paramount to ultimate success and victory for any leader and any team.
Although discipline demands control and asceticism, it actually
results in freedom. When you have the discipline to get up early, you are
rewarded with more free time. When you have the discipline to keep
your helmet and body armor on in the field, you become accustomed to
it and can move freely in it. The more discipline you have to work out,
train your body physically and become stronger, the lighter your gear
feels and the easier you can move around in it.
As I advanced into leadership positions, I strived to constantly
improve my personal discipline. I realized very quickly that discipline
was not only the most important quality for an individual but also for a
team. The more disciplined standard operating procedures (SOPs) a team
employs, the more freedom they have to practice Decentralized
Command (chapter 8) and thus they can execute faster, sharper, and
more efficiently. Just as an individual excels when he or she exercises
self-discipline, a unit that has tighter and more-disciplined procedures
and processes will excel and win.
I carried the idea of disciplined standard operating procedures into
Task Unit Bruiser. While there were all kinds of preexisting SOPs that
SEAL platoons and task units followed—how we react to enemy contact
in predetermined maneuvers called “immediate action drills,” the way
we patrol as a standard method that varies little from platoon to platoon
—in Bruiser, we took them even further. We standardized the way we
loaded vehicles. We standardized the way we mustered in a building on a