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Scrapped speech became Make Your Bed
Scrapping the draft
William McRaven writes his own speeches and had been drafting this one for a couple of weeks around his day job. On the Wednesday before the Saturday he was due to speak, he went to his wife and told her it didn't work. She asked why he didn't write about something he knew. The only thing he knew, he answered, was how to be a Navy SEAL, and she told him to write about that.
The first lesson
Basic SEAL training lasted six months, and it was life crammed into six months, with instructors making sure trainees learned early what they would need later. The first of the ten lessons became the title: make your bed. Starting the day with a simple task you know you can do inspires you to do another task, and another.
The instructors also wanted the bed made to standard. If a trainee can't do the little things right, nobody can trust him to do the big things right, like leading a complex SEAL mission.
The last lesson
The last lesson sits at the other end of training: never ring the bell. A trainee who has quit rings it three times and is out. If what you're doing is good, decent, noble, and honorable, the bell stays silent. The one exception is cancer, where ringing it marks the completion of the journey.
How did one speech become a book?
McRaven gave the speech at the University of Texas at Austin in May 2014. A video of it spread widely online in the weeks and months that followed. He expanded it into a book, Make Your Bed, published in 2017. The book keeps the ten-lesson structure of the speech and adds stories from his career.
Why does a finished small task motivate?
Harvard researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer studied thousands of diary entries from knowledge workers at several companies. They found that the best days at work were most often days with progress on meaningful work, even small progress. They called this the progress principle and published it in a 2011 book of that name.
Why does SEAL training let trainees quit?
In Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, known as BUD/S, a bell hangs where every trainee can see it. Ringing it ends the training immediately, with no penalty beyond leaving the course. The design puts the decision to continue in each trainee's hands at every moment. Most candidates who start the course do not finish it.
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