There are people in the world who have skills and strength and talent that I will never have. Never. These notions that you can 'be whatever you want to be as long as you want it bad enough' are not true. They are fairy tales.

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.

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.

We have food all around us all the time, and if we haven't eaten for three hours, we think we're starving. You're not starving - human beings can go for 30 days without food.

Freedom is what everyone wants - to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.

One of the best mental disciplines for people to implement is simply putting together a schedule or a task list and actually executing it. Write the list or the schedule the night before, and then do what you said you would do. Life becomes much better when you do that.

While discipline and freedom seem like they sit on opposite sides of the spectrum, they are actually very connected.

Leadership is hard. It's a skill. It's a technique.

SEALs are human beings. We may all have the same haircuts, but we aren't robots. Some SEALs are great people. Some are not great people. Some have done unspeakably terrible things. You're dealing with different people, different dreams, different desires.

When a team takes ownership of its problems, the problem gets solved. It is true on the battlefield, it is true in business, and it is true in life.

Since the team understands that the leader is de facto in charge, in that respect, a leader has nothing to prove. But in another respect, a leader has everything to prove: Every member of the team must develop the trust and confidence that their leader will exercise good judgment, remain calm, and make the right decisions when it matters most.

If you try and work out at 4:30 in the afternoon, how many people are going to chip away at that time? Your boss, your job, your work, your family, your other obligations that you might have. At 4:30 in the morning, all those people are asleep, so you can do whatever you want.

Just as discipline and freedom are opposing forces that must be balanced, leadership requires finding the equilibrium in the dichotomy of many seemingly contradictory qualities between one extreme and another.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it's fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

Perseverance is also key to success in any endeavor, but without perseverance in combat, there can be no victory.

If it's stress of things that we cannot control, what you have to do is you mitigate that stress as much as possible. You've planned, you've trained, you've done everything you can in your power to mitigate the stress that's facing you. And then after that, there's nothing you can do. So, you have to let that one go.

Your success, or lack of success, is your responsibility. Even when you have a chain of command that you don't like as well, its your responsibility to work with the up chain of command.

Some people, they take their form of working out as a religion that they think is better than everyone else's. I'm not like that. If you have a better way to work out, and you can teach it to me, and I find it to be useful and gets me in better shape, I'm all about.

Don't think in the morning. That's a big mistake that people make. They wake up in the morning and they start thinking. Don't think. Just execute the plan. The plan is the alarm clock goes off, you get up, you go work out. Get some.

It's not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn't sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?

That nice, soft pillow and the warm blanket, and it's all comfortable, and no one wants to leave that comfort - but if you can wake up early in the morning, get a head start on everyone else that's still sleeping, get productive time doing things that you need to do - that's a huge piece to moving your life forward.

When things are going bad, don't get all bummed out. Don't get startled; don't get frustrated. If you can say the word 'good,' guess what? It means you're still alive. It means you're still breathing.

We record when I have a hole in the schedule. Sometimes night, sometimes afternoon, sometimes morning - we fit it in when we can. I prep for episodes all the time.

I would say there are some foods that I strongly recommend that you do not eat. No. 1 on that list, I believe, is doughnuts. Comfort food. Zero value. Don't eat them.

One of the key qualities a leader must possess is the ability to detach from the chaos, mayhem, and emotions in a situation and make good, clear decisions based on what is actually happening.

Just on a practical side, if you wake up early in the morning - like at 4:30 in the morning - you're going to have some free time to yourself to make things happen, to take care of things that are important to you.