Bill McRaven

Husband, Father, Sailor, Author, Avid Bed-Maker

**What's the weirdest thing in your travel bag?**
I think a lot of people expect that in my travel bag, I'm going to carry some very sophisticated reading material because I do a lot of geopolitical analysis and all that, but the reality of the matter is, I generally have a John D. McDonald novel in there from the 1960s. McDonald had this long series of Travis McGee novels. And Travis McGee was one of these kind of lovable scoundrels. And so, when I'm on the plane, I look around and make sure nobody's looking and then I pull out my little John D. McDonald novel. But other than that, my travel bag's pretty simple.

**What's a book that changed your life?**
I read a lot of poetry. And very early on, my mother gave me the kind of classic book, *101 Famous Poems*. And I love the classics. I love Kipling, Longfellow and Wordsworth. I loved the way they were able to tell a story in a short format. I've been told before that my little books have a poetic sense to them. And I think a lot of that stemmed from reading poetry growing up.

**What's something you're afraid of?**
I have a fear of heights. And that sounds strange, considering I jump out of airplanes. It never really bothered me to jump out of airplanes, we used to do routinely from 30,000 feet at night. And that sort of height doesn't bother me. What I've come to realize is, if I can see the relief, if I'm on a tall building, for example, and I see the next floor and the next, or if I'm on a mountain and I can see the relief, that scares the hell out of me.

First, have a plan (a Navy SEAL’s guide to risk).

We wanted to talk to you about risks you’ve taken as a Navy SEAL and later commander of Special Operations Command (including the orchestration and execution of the Bin Laden raid), but what is your actual relationship to risk or how do you view it?

From a very young age, I was a guy who enjoyed risks. I think it's a natural part of a lot of people who come into the military. I think, in some ways, there's personal risk in that, "Am I good enough to be an Army Ranger, a Navy SEAL?" Or whatever it happens to be. There's a risk of, "What if I fail trying to do that? Will that impact me?"

But of course, the other risks are jumping out of planes, locking out of submarines, the sort of physical risks that come along with the job. But I would tell you that those sort of risks never really bothered me. And part of this was—whether it's ego or a sense of confidence—I knew I was physically fit enough that if I got into a tough situation, I had the physical aptitude and the training to hopefully be able to get out of it.

As you get older and in a position of more responsibility, taking risks on the battlefield in particular, you look at risk in a very calculated fashion. Every mission, every operation, has some risk; you try to minimize it. You make a simple plan, you rehearse it consistently and constantly, you make sure that you keep it classified, and that the men or women that are going on the mission have all the right training and resources. You begin to take the risk on a mission to the point where it is manageable.

There's always risk, and Murphy’s Law always comes into play, but you think about risk in that, "Okay. I'm going to assume this risk. I have a plan A, a plan B, a plan C and a plan D." Risk was just something that, in my career, you lived with every day. Sometimes you're successful in managing the risk, and sometimes you're not. And sometimes, things get too risky and you make mistakes, not because you didn't follow the calculation, but just because that's the nature of risk. Some things you can't quite calculate, and the enemy always gets a vote.

But I was never afraid of risk. In fact, I enjoyed putting myself (and sometimes the people who work for me) in positions that may have been high-risk to start with, but I thought we got to the point where the risk was managed.

There’s a saying in the military, "Don't take too much counsel of your fears." This is important because if you begin to play out the worst-case scenarios, it can get pretty bad. You accept the fact that there is this kind of cascading effect after a decision is made, but you have other opportunities to engage on that decision to ensure that it doesn't become the worst-case scenario. But, boy, if all you do is think about the worst-case scenario, you get paralyzed by the fear and you won't take any risks.

What's the biggest risk—personal or professional—you've taken?

The nature of the job, every day, came with professional risk in that, if you failed as a commander, you were ultimately looking at the men and women serving with you and telling them why you failed—why your leadership wasn't successful. And then you've got to be able to report to bosses on why things didn't go well.

Of course I would have to look at the Bin Laden raid as a professional risk, not because I think it was tactically more challenging than some of the other missions, but because one, you have the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, everybody looking over your shoulders to some degree. And while they never put any pressure on me in that regard (which I always appreciated) you know they're there, that the world is watching, and you know that if you mess this up, this will be your place in history. That you failed to plan it correctly, command it correctly, whatever it was—that will be your legacy.

So there was risk in that, but candidly, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it because I knew we’d planned it correctly, that we had the right people on the job, that I had the right tools. In retrospect, all the missions were right up there in terms of professional risk, but in a strange way it didn't bother me. It didn't affect the pressure I felt, but I wasn't naive to it either.

What's something you elected not to do because you deemed it too risky, and were later happy you didn’t do it?

I thought through this question pretty hard and actually, nothing came to mind. I think that was because the analytical aspect of understanding risk was something that was embedded into all of the commanders doing these sorts of things.

Now, I have had times where decisions not to do something later turned out to be good, but it wasn't a function of risk. When I was a young lieutenant junior grade, I was with a Marine colonel. We had been on a training exercise—and it had been disastrous. We were supposed to finish the exercise by getting on board a C-130 combat talon to do some low-level terrain following. But because it had been such a disaster from a training standpoint and it was a long night and everything was running late, I convinced the colonel that he didn't need to get on the airplane. And I was going to go with him.

Tragically, that airplane crashed an hour or so later, killing all but one on board. I've told this story before, because this happens a fair amount in your military career, where you decided to go left instead of right and in the right lane, there were a bunch of Iraqis getting ready to ambush you, but you went left. And you begin to wonder, in a more grand sense, why me? Why didn't I get on that airplane? Why did people die when they turned right instead of left? You know they were good people, so you begin to think philosophically about a lot of these issues. I'm not sure there’s a good answer.

Many of our readers are thinking of the next verse for themselves. What did you learn in your transition from the military to the Chancellor of a large university system (University of Texas)?

One thing I realized very quickly was that the fundamentals of leadership are, in fact, fungible: how you work with your staff, how you work with your component commanders—in this case, the presidents of the universities and the healthcare systems. How you have to treat the students, the rank and file, the troops, and the faculty. The leadership skills learned in the military work in government service as well. As a servant leader, my job was to ensure that the presidents of the institutions had the resources and the latitude to do the job, and were held accountable when they failed to do the job. I had to provide them with strategic guidance. I had to, every once in a while, give them a little tough love.

So the transition was pretty seamless for me. I had a staff, I knew how to make decisions. Even though I knew nothing about healthcare or higher education, it was no different than when I was the commander of SOCOM. I didn't know how to fly a helicopter, but I had helicopter pilots; I didn't know the law, but I had lawyers. I had doctors. You call upon the smart men and women in the room to help you make the decisions. So that part went pretty smoothly.

Of course, when you transition to any new job, you have to learn the business of the job. I had to learn about healthcare and higher education. And you've got to earn respect every single time; I don't care who you are coming into a new job, the first thing you have to do is earn the respect of the men and women you serve.

What was surprising about it was that I knew, coming into it, that the politics were going to be dicey, but I don't think I fully appreciated how rough and tumble the politics could be. And again, there were some great state legislators, some great senators that really worked to do what was right for the state of Texas. But then, there were others—as I think there are everywhere—who were more concerned about serving their own interests and couldn't see the bigger picture of helping some of the lesser institutions within the UT system. In general, it was a great, great job. I wouldn't change a minute of it.

Barbara Waxman mentioned the concept of VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic and Ambiguous), which she learned from someone with a national security background. Are you familiar with this concept? Since this probably describes the environments you have spent a bulk of your career in, how do you think people can think about risk with VUCA as a backdrop?

The thing I would offer to your readers is, we've got to put this time into context. This time, as bad as it might seem, pales in comparison to some of the previous times in American history. It just does.

We actually are fairly good at adapting. And I would offer that you can't fear the future. If you do, you're just going to be paralyzed by fear and stay in your house. Yes, there are bad things out there; there always have been. There was the flu of 1918, the Black Plague, the 60 Years War, the Hundred Years War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. Pick a period of time. There are bad things out there, but they haven’t all ended up on your doorstep. The problem today is that because we are exposed to so much media, every time you hear about a horrific incident someplace, it somehow translates into you and you're like, "Oh, my God. That could have been me."

I guess it could have been you, or it could have been 320 other million Americans. But it wasn't. There was a great article several years ago, I think in The New York Times, about fear. It gave statistics: How many people are killed in this? How many people die in car accidents? How many die of heart attacks? How many die of cancer? How many are in mass shootings? Of course, when you put it in perspective, as tragic as some of those things are, you realize the chances of it happening to you are pretty small.

Now, that's no consolation if it does happen to you. It's like getting eaten by a shark. Every time you get into the waters at night as a Navy SEAL you think, "A lot of sharks out here." But if you look at the statistics, you say, "Hey, my chances of getting eaten by a shark are pretty damn slim." Until it happens. And then you could say, "Oh, that wasn't too good." But the point is, we've got to steel ourselves against some of the constant refrain out there that somehow gets transposed and translated into our lives. You can't live your life in fear.

What's a good baby step for those of us who need to flex our "discomfort" muscle?

I always tell people, "Take one step."

Take one step forward. Sometimes, we get afraid of the long term. We look at the event horizon of a particular challenge in front of us and we go, "Oh, my God. I can't do that." In SEAL training, we used to have a saying, "Take it one evolution at a time." As Navy SEALs, we go from being tadpoles to frogmen. We are evolving from being little tadpoles to growing up to be frogmen. So the events are called evolutions.

The way you used to work was the senior officer in the class was the only one who would get the daily schedule. And they—in my case, Lieutenant Junior Grade Daniel Stewart—would never show it to anybody because it would show two hours of calisthenics, short break, four miles soft sand run, short break, three-mile open ocean swim, short break, put a boat on your head, run to chow, come back, obstacle course, short break, more calisthenics, short break, and people would go, "Oh, my God!"

And then, oh, that's one day. Multiply that by five days and that time by six months, and it would scare the hell out of you.

Now, do you have to have a little bit of a plan for your life? Of course you do. You need to look more broadly. But just take it one step at a time. If you're going to branch out at this age and try something new, give it a try. What's the worst that can happen? You fail? By this time in our life, we've probably all failed a lot of times. Nobody's going to laugh at you and nobody's going to mock you. If you fail, you just say, "Eh, it didn't work out." And you go try something else or something else or something else, but don't stop trying. Don't be afraid out there. Just take one step and see how it goes.

Planning for Risk like a Navy SEAL