Make Your Bed to Standard to Start the Day With Momentum
A former SEAL commander says nailing one small task proves you can be trusted with bigger ones.
Not Dead Yet · William McRavenWilliam McRaven, the former Navy SEAL who once ran U.S. Special Operations, says making the bed was the first of 10 lessons from basic SEAL training.
Days before he was to speak at a large university graduation, McRaven scrapped his commencement draft as unusable. His wife told him to write about something he knew. The only thing he knew, he told her, was how to be a SEAL. She told him to write about that.
What came out was the idea that basic SEAL training, which lasts six months, was life crammed into six months. The first lesson was the way every day in training started: make your bed.
The method is simple on purpose. Pick a small task you know you can finish, do it correctly and to standard, and let that completion push you onward. McRaven put it this way: "you wanna start your day doing a simple task that you know you can do that will inspire you to do another task and another and another." In training, instructors inspected the bed because they cared about habits and standards of excellence. McRaven said the instructors' point was "if you can't even do the little things right, how can we ever trust you to do the big things right," like leading a complex mission.
McRaven paired that opener with an ending. In training, anyone who wanted to quit had only to ring a bell three times and leave. His rule, in his words, was that if what you are doing is "good and decent and noble and honorable," then "don't ever ring that bell." In between came other plain rules: do not back down from bullies, take risks, and learn to deal with failure by getting back up quickly.
Questions people ask
Does making your bed actually make you more productive?
McRaven's case is about momentum, not magic. He says finishing one simple task to standard inspires the next task and the next. Whether that helps you will depend on the day, but it does give you one finished job before the day gets complicated.
What is SEAL training?
Basic SEAL training runs about six months and covers swimming, running, navigation and small-boat teamwork under exhaustion and constant scrutiny. If a trainee wants to quit, McRaven says, he rings a bell three times and leaves.
What does “never ring the bell” mean in everyday life?
In training it is literal: ring a bell three times and you are out. McRaven uses it to mean quitting something worthwhile because it gets hard, and he adds one exception from his own telling. If you finish cancer treatment, ringing the bell to mark the end is worth celebrating.