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Division I stars quit BUD/S
Everyone loses in training
SEAL training is built so that nobody wins everything. Instructors find what a trainee is not good at and exploit it, so every candidate loses. The kid who was the star of the football team and the captain of this and that has been winning his whole life. He arrives at BUD/S and he quits.
Plenty of the highest-level college athletes have skills that translate well to basic SEAL training, and plenty of them quit anyway. When a loss disrupts a person's motivation, quitting is the likely result. The selection process weeds out people who cannot recover quickly from something bad, which means the men who reach a SEAL team are generally pretty resilient when it comes to losing.
Losses on a team
The losses on a team are bigger ones. A man on a team is no longer losing a race. He is losing one of his friends.
Why do lifelong winners struggle with failure?
In a 1998 study, Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck gave fifth graders a set of puzzles, then praised some for being smart and others for working hard. After a harder set of problems that most children failed, those praised for intelligence enjoyed the task less, persisted less, and scored worse on a follow-up set than those praised for effort. In a related experiment, the children praised for intelligence were also more likely to choose easy tasks over hard ones they could learn from.
Why did grit predict who finished West Point training?
West Point opens each cadet's first year with a demanding summer program nicknamed Beast Barracks, and a small share of each class drops out of it. In a 2007 study, Angela Duckworth and colleagues measured grit, defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, in an incoming class. Grit predicted who completed Beast Barracks better than the Academy's own Whole Candidate Score, which combines academic, physical, and leadership measures.
How did SEAL training grow from World War II?
SEAL training descends from World War II units that cleared beach obstacles before landings. The Navy created Naval Combat Demolition Units in 1943 and trained them at Fort Pierce, Florida. Draper Kauffman, who ran that school, built a grueling week of sleepless training into its core, the ancestor of Hell Week. The Navy commissioned the first SEAL Teams in 1962.
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