Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...and Maybe the World

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on learning from failure, and specifically, learning how to brave the possibility of failure in order to achieve success. After a failure in training, McRaven was remanded into The Circus—a punishment program meant to either drive trainees out of the SEAL program or force them to succeed—and this becomes for McRaven the mental fuel to persevere. The physical demands of grueling additional exercise revealed the extent of his ability to endure suffering to achieve a goal. McRaven argues that while the average person is unlikely to face something like The Circus voluntarily, its reliance on the adage “no pain, no gain” rings familiar to anyone who has put hard effort into getting some kind of result. However, by his own admission, the goal of The Circus is to drum out the unworthy. Thus, it is not really a teaching tool, but a crucible that doesn’t really follow the improvement model suggested by “no pain, no gain”—often, in The Circus, there is extensive pain followed by no gain as a trainee quits the SEAL program. Because of this, the ostensibly similar pursuits of McRaven’s readers—training for a marathon, or studying for an exam—don’t actually replicate the Circus experience. Conversely, McRaven’s story of being fired and having to work his way back up is highly relatable—losing a job is a very common experience. His example of using this failure to reconsider his approach to his work, retooling his soft skills and making himself a better leader in the process, is a useful narrative.

The sixth chapter again makes surprising, and not always coherent logical leaps. McRaven connects his initial trepidation and eventual success in a physically daring exercise to a later decision to undertake a dangerous hostage retrieval operation. However, a closer look seems to suggest that the situations were not very congruent. Climbing down a rope cautiously is safer, though slower. While speed might be of the essence in a race, in the logistics of military operations, caution is not a negative—it often saves civilian bystander lives. McRaven makes it clear that a nighttime raid—the more cautious approach—was far the preferred option, and the operation only took place in the daytime because there was no opportunity to do it otherwise. He wants to make the point that acts of daring are necessary for dramatic success; however, he does not describe would-be daring military maneuvers that ended in failure, so the reader has no basis for comparison.