#105： Lessons from a Navy SEAL on Resilience With Eric Greitens
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Summary
Eric Greitens is a Truman Scholar, Rhodes Scholar, and former Navy SEAL. He is the author of "The Heart and the Fist," a book about his experience as a humanitarian and a Navy SEAL, and his new book, "Resilience," which lays out a philosophy of resilience.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Well, I am really
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excited about our guest today. One of the most fascinating people I've ever encountered. His
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name is Eric Greitens, Truman Scholar, Rhodes Scholar, super smart guy, studied at Oxford.
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He did humanitarian work with war refugees in Croatia and Rwanda and then other places in the
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world. After he graduated from Oxford, he decided to become a Navy SEAL. Did that, went through budge
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training, became a Navy SEAL, actually did combat, earned the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star. And after
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that, he's continued his work with humanitarian aid, teaching people how to be leaders. He wrote a
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book about his experience as a humanitarian and as a Navy SEAL. It's called The Heart and the Fist.
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And his latest book is called Resilience. And I'm going to say right here, it's the best book I've
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read so far this year. And I think it's going to be the best book I've read in 2015. Hands down,
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one of my all time favorite books. What it is, it's a book that's inspired by the letters that he wrote
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to a Navy SEAL bud who was going through a hard time. And it's all about becoming more resilient
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in life. And Eric combines philosophy from Aristotle, Thucydides, modern psychology,
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and his own experience as a Navy SEAL and lays out a philosophy of resilience. And I've read a lot
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about resilience, studied a lot about resilience, and this is by far the best book I've read about
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the topic. Eric and I are going to talk about resilience, what it means, how to develop it.
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Fascinating discussion. So let's do this. All right, Eric Greidens, welcome to the show.
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Hey, Brett, great to be on with you. Real pleasure to be with you.
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All right, well, so before we get into your latest book, Resilience, let's talk a little
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about your background, because it's really fascinating. So you started out as a humanitarian,
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doing humanitarian work in Africa, but then you became a Navy SEAL. And those things seem like
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diametrically opposed. But you make the case in your book, The Heart and the Fist, that they're
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actually very compatible. Can you explain how you went from humanitarian to Navy SEAL and how you see
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those sort of fitting together into your mission? Yeah, of course, Brett. So you're right, I did a lot
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of humanitarian work before I joined the military. I'd worked in Bosnia with refugee children. I worked in
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Rwanda with kids who'd been orphaned and abused, who are survivors of the genocide, worked in
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Cambodia with kids who'd lost limbs to landmines, kids who were survivors of polio. And I remember
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actually, there was one time I was in Bosnia. And as you and the folks who are listening to our
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podcast will remember, there were horrible campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in the 1990s.
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I was 20 years old at the time working in a refugee camp. And I sat down with this guy and he said to
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me, he said, you know what? He said, I appreciate that you're here. He said, please understand. I
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appreciate that you're here. I'm glad that there's a roof over my head. I appreciate that the international
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humanitarian communities provided food for my family, that there's a little kindergarten for my
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kids to go to school. He said, but I said, if people really cared about us, they'd be willing to
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help to protect us. And I didn't know what to say to him at the time, Brett. I was 20 years old
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sitting in this refugee camp. But I realized later that what he said was true, that if you really love
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anything, if you really care about anything, you're willing to respond not only with compassion, but
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you're willing to respond with courage, that you have to be willing to stand up and protect those
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things that you care about and protect the people that you care about. And I believe that, you know,
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you have to bring, you have to live a life that involves both courage and compassion. I think that
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without courage, your compassion falters. It's courage that really makes your compassion meaningful.
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At the same time, without compassion, courage doesn't really have any direction. You've got to
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have that compassion that provides direction for your, for your courage. And so after I joined the
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military relatively late, I was 26 years old. I finished a dissertation writing about how international
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humanitarian organizations worked with kids in war zones. And then I made this transition from
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the academic world to officer candidate school and to the SEAL teams. And it was one of the best
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decisions I ever made in my life. Yeah. For those of you who don't know, you're a Rhodes Scholar
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as well, right? That's part of your career. I was, I had a great time at Oxford, got a wonderful,
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wonderful education there. Yeah. I mean, I think you wrote that, you know, in order to be good,
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you have to be strong and then in order to be strong, you have to be good. That's exactly right.
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And I think that, you know, and men know this instinctively, right? We know that there is a
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real power that comes when we're living for a purpose that's larger than ourselves. There's a
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strength that comes from having compassion, from having friends who we care about, that those things
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actually make us stronger when we're, when we're good. And we also recognize it in order to do things
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well that care for people, to provide for people. You have to have some strength and you got to find
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ways to bring that strength and goodness, that courage and compassion together to really live
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a full life. Okay. So yeah, if you, if you haven't read his book, Heart in a Fist, go check it out. It's
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a very great read, but let's talk about your most recent book, Resilience. Can you tell me the story
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how that book came to be? Yeah. So I was driving home in the middle of Missouri. I'm on highway 70
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heading from Columbia, Missouri back home. And I looked down and my, my phone is ringing and it
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was my, my friend, Zach Walker. And Zach is a guy who had been through BUDS training with me. BUDS is
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the basic underwater demolition seal training, the basic Navy seal training, really good friend of
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mine, but the kind of guy who you, you know, you have a real intense experience like that with your
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great friends. And then you stay in touch, you know, maybe once a year. And when I saw him calling Brett,
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I actually, I thought it was going to be bad news. I thought he was going to call and tell me that
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another one of our friends from our, from our BUDS class had died. And I answered the phone and it,
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it turned out not to be that. Now you got to understand a little bit about who Zach Walker
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was. This is a kid from a Northern California logging family and a tough guy, like even in a BUDS class
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of people who are all trying to be Navy SEALs. Zach Walker was, was one of the toughest. And,
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you know, we'd been through training together. And after that, he went to the East Coast SEAL
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teams. I stayed on the West Coast and he told me what, what had happened. You know, he went to
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Afghanistan, did a deployment and came home as this kind of Navy SEAL war hero. You know, he'd done his
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service over there, came home and then he bought a concrete pumper, started a small business, taking
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care of his family, had two young kids at the time. And then Brett, his life was just hammered by
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hardship. His brother died. He lost his business and pulls into his driveway one night, gets out of
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his truck and drops to the ground because he thinks there's a sniper watching him. And he lays there for
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hours until the sun goes down. And then he gets up and runs into his house and he realizes, man,
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I've got post-traumatic stress disorder. He starts drinking and Zach never did anything in moderation.
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So it's not a case, but a cooler full of beer that he's working through on the weekend. And he called
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me after he'd been arrested. So you got a guy who's, you know, Navy SEAL war hero, small business
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owner taking care of his family who goes down then to being an unemployed alcoholic on disability who's
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looking at the possibility of having his kids come to visit him in jail. We talked for a while. And then
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that night I got home and I started writing him a letter, um, about what it takes to build resilience.
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And, you know, I drew from my experience, not just in the SEAL team training, but doing that
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humanitarian work, working with veterans who'd come home. He wrote back to me and the book is a
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series of 23 letters to my friend, Zach Walker, who, who I love and was, was going through a tough time.
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Yeah. And what I loved about that format, cause it is, there are letters that you, to your friend
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Walker is that it felt like you were like talking to the reader, right? There'd be some, I knew you
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were like, you were talking to your friend, but like, it felt like when I was reading, it's like,
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man, he's talking to me because it was, that's what I loved about that format. It's very personable.
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Well, thanks a lot. You know, I, we've had, we've had a lot of folks who've, who've said that to us.
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And I think that is one of the really nice things about the letter format is that everybody can read
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this and everybody has to deal with pain in their life. Everybody has to deal with, with hardship.
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And you can really take this. It's a very practical, um, advice that I was giving to, to a friend.
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And, uh, the, you in the book is, is often, you know, the readers say like, Hey, this guy's,
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he's talking right to me. It's a, you bring an interesting point. So your friend, I mean, he,
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yeah, he was a Navy SEAL. He saw some, just some terrible stuff. He, and he was tough. Um,
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but then you see people where they're put in a different context and they become unresilient,
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even though you think, wow, wow, you were resilient in this situation. Why doesn't resilience
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translate over to civilian life where you don't have to, you know, checking your six all the time?
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Why, why is it possible to have like uneven resilience or uneven courage?
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Yeah, I think it absolutely is, Brett. I think you've hit on something that's really important.
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And I do think that people have uneven courage. Like we all have uneven courage. I have uneven
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courage. You have uneven courage. Zach has uneven courage. And the reason why is that you build
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courage through the practice of facing fear. And so while you can learn to face fear very comfortably
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in one context, you can still act cowardly in, in another. I mean, and, and I saw this a lot in my
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work with veterans. You'd work with people who, you know, every day got up, they'd put on body armor,
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check a radio, load a rifle, step into a Humvee, drive into the streets of a place like Fallujah Rock,
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kick down a door behind which they believe they were all kind of terrorists. And then
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they come home and maybe they've been burned or they've lost a limb and they're afraid to go to the
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mall because they're afraid of what kids might say. And, and so you do find we all have uneven
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courage. It was something that I, you know, I actually learned a good story from time when I was,
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was boxing. I was, I knew a guy who had once been a trainer to one of the heavyweight champions of the
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world. And he told me the story. He said that one day the heavyweight champion of the world calls
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him on the phone and says, Hey man, Hey, I need you to, I need you to help me. I need you to talk to
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somebody for me. And the trainer says, well, what is it? What do you, what do you need me to do?
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And the heavyweight champion of the world says, there's this guy, he's, he's in the other room
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and I'm going to take the phone in and you got to talk to him for me. And the trainer says, well,
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well, who do you need me to talk to? And the heavyweight champion of the world says to him,
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he says, man, it's, it's my gardener. And the trainer says, well, why do you need me to talk to,
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talk to your gardener? And the heavyweight champ says, well, he's got this bill and he's trying to
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overcharge me. And the trainer said to me, he said, Eric, this is one of the reasons why so
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many of these men are taken advantage of once they become champions. He said, they've had all
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of this training and how you confront one kind of fear. And no one would question their physical
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courage in the ring. And yet they've never learned how you confront somebody over an emotional issue,
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a social issue, a financial issue. And then they become champions and they're hit by all of these
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issues and they're often beset by fear. So I think it's very true. We all have uneven courage. And I
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think the promise of, you know, what I hope is, is the promise of the resilience book is it gives
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everybody, points us in a direction to show us how we can start to build that courage in our lives.
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How do you define resilience? Because we've written about it before on the site. We've
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interviewed other guests who've talked about resilience. Do you define it as bouncing back
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or is it something else? So I actually, I think it's something else, Brett. I think that
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resilience is the virtue that enables us to move through hardship and become better. That's how I
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define it. It's the virtue that enables you to move through hardship and become better. And I'll tell
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you why I don't think of it as, as bouncing back. So you may know the resilience, our use of the word
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resilience actually comes to us from physics. So in physics, there's this principle of elasticity
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and the basic idea is that you hit an object with compressive stress and resilience is the measure of
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how quickly that object can return to its prior state after it's been hit by an outside force.
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And so that's what we've taken that idea of resilience and we've applied it to human beings. And we tell
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people you should just bounce back, bounce back, bounce back. And I actually believe human beings can't
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bounce back. And the reason why you can't bounce back is because you can't go back in time.
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So the 19 year old Marine who leaves for Afghanistan is never going to be 19 again. And parents who lose
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a child are never going to be the same parents again. The entrepreneur whose business goes bankrupt is
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never going to be the same entrepreneur again. So what resilient people are able to do is not to bounce
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back from hardship, but they're able to integrate hard experiences into their lives in such a way that they
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become better. And that's what I think is really at the heart of resilience.
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Do you think, and we've, I've asked this question too, you know, when I look back at my own ancestors,
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right. And, you know, they, they crossed the plains with hand carts, buried children, buried wise,
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buried husbands, and they just seemed really tough. And, and now you look at, I look at myself and
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there's like situations where I'm just like, I kind of like, I'm like that boxer. I'm like, oh gosh,
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I got to like talk to this, this guy who's overcharging me. That kind of freaks me out.
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Do you think our modern culture, sort of our comforts make us less resilient because we don't
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have opportunities to practice it all that often?
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I definitely think that cultures in the past had to live harder lives. And it's one of the reasons
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why so much of the wisdom about resilience that's in the book is ancient wisdom. It's because 2000 years
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ago, if your friend who is 22 years old got a toothache, they might die. The odds of your children
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living past the age of seven were slim. People had to deal with starvation. They had to deal with
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drought. They had to deal with disease and hardship in a way that was, that for many of us can't even
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fathom today. And so what's powerful, I think, is when you look back though, you see there is
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all of this ancient wisdom about how to deal with hardship. And what I've tried to do in resilience
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is to make a lot of that wisdom really accessible to people so that you can see how, what people
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learned in the past can be applied to your life today. Okay. So throughout the book, each letter
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has a topic. Yes. I guess it's sort of a component of resilience. I mean, I know you can't go through
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exhaustively all of them, but what are some of like the big components of resilience and how do you go
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about developing these? Well, so I think, you know, big picture, I'd say in terms of how you develop
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resilience, it's, it's the same, like the way you develop any virtue, right? It's like courage. It's
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like compassion. It's like humility. And you, you develop a virtue by practicing it. If you want to
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be courageous, you act with courage. If you want to be compassionate, you act with compassion.
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It's a very Aristotelian approach. Yes, yes, exactly. It's a very Aristotelian. And what's great about it
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too, Brett, is that it's so hopeful because what it says to you is that you do not have to be the
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person that you are today. If you want to be someone else, if you want to change your character,
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if you start acting in a certain way, you can literally shape and build your own character
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through by, with the right intention followed by the right actions. And that's, what's really,
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that's, what's really hopeful about this. And so, you know, some, just some of the pieces that we
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talk about in resilience is that, you know, people are much more resilient when they have a purpose,
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when they have a why. One of the things that I quote in the book is a philosopher who said that
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if you have the right why, you can make it through any how. A lot of times when people are in a place
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where they're dealing with hardship and change and challenge and chaos and confusion, they're
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overwhelmed by how they're trying to think, you know, how am I going to support my family? How am I
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going to deal with this? And if people have the right why, if they know that I have to do this
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because my family needs me, because my community needs me, because my friends need me, that why
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actually makes people much more powerful. So, you know, I talk, for example, about how you build that
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sense of purpose. Also, people who are resilient find ways to take responsibility. Even in situations
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where lots of things are out of their control, they find ways to take responsibility for what
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they can be responsible for. And as you know, there are other chapters about how you find a model for
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yourself, how you build mentors into your life, how you build mental toughness. All of those different
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pieces actually go into helping us to live resilient lives. And one thing that struck me as I read this
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book, and a lot of the books that I've read about resilience is that I think misses is that I think
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Americans often think of this idea of resilience that you'll achieve it. And then once you're there,
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like you're good to go, like, you'll never like everything, it doesn't matter whatever comes you
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you've achieved resilience. So you're good. But to reading your book, it sounds like it is a continual
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thing. Like some days you'll be more resilient. And then other days, you might be less, but you have to
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keep working at it. Yeah, that's exactly right. That this is, this is a practice that you build
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into your life. And just like being humble, or being courageous, or being compassionate, it's not
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like you get to say, you know what, I achieved courage two years ago. And now I don't have to act
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with courage anymore. You, you, the virtues manifest themselves by what we do in the world. And so if you're
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going to be resilient, you have to be resilient every day. And what's fortunate is that life
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provides us with all of these different opportunities to learn and to grow and to build
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our character every day. So you have to be process oriented, not outcome oriented. Absolutely,
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absolutely. Now, that doesn't mean that you don't have set of goals, and you push yourself and you
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challenge yourself towards that. But what it does mean is that you recognize that the process of
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building a virtue is something that's never complete, you never get to say, like,
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I'm resilient. Now I'm done, I finished the course, like we all every day have to build resilience.
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Even for me, what was fun, Brett, about writing the book was that it actually made me reflect on my
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own life. And I think, you know, helped me to build build resilience in my own life.
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So you're going back to that idea about taking responsibility is an important part of you mentioned
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somewhere that really stuck out to me was this, you know, oftentimes we live in a society that has
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that we have a morality of intentions, that, oh, you know, like, you have like, I want to do that,
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but then you really don't do anything. I mean, can you explain what you meant by a morality of
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intentions? And how does that make a culture or a person less resilient?
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Yeah, so what happens a lot today, Brett, is that I think there are two ways of thinking about
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morality, right? You can think of either a morality of intentions or a morality of results.
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And the morality of intention says that we get to measure our goodness in terms of what we hope to
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accomplish rather than what we actually accomplish. It tells us that our thoughts and feelings count for
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something in their own right. And it's an appealing philosophy for people who exist or want to exist in
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a world of pure thought and feeling. But it can actually be a very selfish kind of morality. I think
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one of the examples I used in the book as I was writing to Zach, as I said, look, Zach, I said,
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think about somebody who decides that they want to tutor a third grader, right? They're going to go
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after school, they're going to tutor a third grader who's having trouble, where they're going to teach
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them how to read. Right now, our society starts applauding for that person because they've got
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the right intentions. And it's certainly nice if they want to show up every day. But what I say is
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it's wrong to go to those lessons unprepared and incapable of doing real good. Why? Because you'd waste
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that child's time and you'd stand in the way of the help that she really needs.
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From the perspective of intentions, the volunteer can pat himself or herself on the back. But from
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the perspective of results, that volunteer is actually making a contribution to the child's
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illiteracy. And the reason why it's so important to have a morality of results, if you want to be
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resilient, is that you have to actually look at the results that the world is showing you.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, sort of related to that, and this is sort of a common theme throughout,
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sort of related to this idea of wanting to live in the world of feelings. A lot of your
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advice to your friend was like, it was just action oriented.
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And I think oftentimes in society, we have this idea, if you feel it, and then you'll do it,
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what you feel, but you actually propose it's actually different. If you want to feel a certain way,
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you need to do those things that will make you feel that way. Is that right?
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Exactly. Exactly. And it's actually, you know, and this is key to actually understanding how we
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create happiness in our lives and how we build joy. One of the things I said to Zach, you know,
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we were having this discussion one time, and he was telling me about how he was feeling bad in the
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morning, and then he was feeling better, and then he was feeling bad, and how his doctors were asking
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him how he's feeling, and his wife was asking him how he's feeling. And I said, like, what matters right
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now is not how you were feeling, right? It's not that I don't love you. It's not that I don't care
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about you, but that's not what's most important right now. And that our culture sometimes puts
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people in a trap where we first ask them how they're feeling. It's the first question, hey,
00:22:10.300
how are you feeling? How are you doing? How are you feeling? And what happens then is that people
00:22:14.700
begin to think that, well, if I'm feeling a certain way, then I should do something. I should act a certain
00:22:20.580
way. And then what happens, of course, is that they act a certain way, and if you act a certain
00:22:25.540
way repeatedly, you actually build your identity that way. What I said to Zach is you actually have
00:22:31.420
to flip that. And the first question you ask yourself is, who am I, and who do I want to be?
00:22:38.580
If you say, and the answer to that question might be, I want to be a good father. Might be, I want to be
00:22:43.500
a good boss. The answer to that question might be, I want to be a good athlete. And lots of different
00:22:48.460
questions, but the first question you ask yourself is, who do I want to be? And then, you know, if I
00:22:54.180
want to be that kind of person, well, therefore, I must do these things to be that person. And then
00:23:00.120
what you find, and this is the magic piece, is that the way that you act will shape the way that you
00:23:05.000
feel. And we all know this at a really basic level, right? If you get two hours of sleep, you feel
00:23:09.780
different than if you get eight hours of sleep. If you eat healthy, you feel different than if you don't
00:23:13.620
eat healthy. But our culture sometimes puts this privacy on feelings where if we really want to be
00:23:19.880
resilient, we first have to think about our identity. Okay. And so, I mean, what could you do?
00:23:25.740
I mean, if you see someone who's struggling, like your friend, I mean, do you, I mean, what's the best
00:23:33.140
approach to help them? Do you not ask them about their feelings? Or do you say, hey, let's just go,
00:23:37.180
let's go do something? I mean, what, like, what, how do you put that into practice if you're trying to help
00:23:41.200
someone who's having a hard time? Yeah. So, you know, I mean, there's lots of different ways to
00:23:46.260
put it into practice. And I'll mention just, just a few. I mean, first is to actually ask the question,
00:23:52.920
like, who do you want to be? And a lot of times, you know, I asked, I asked Zach, like, who do you
00:23:58.560
want to be? I told him at one point, like, look, you've got a choice here. Like, you can either be
00:24:03.580
the courageous Zach Walker, who I knew when we were going through buds, or you can be the guy who doesn't
00:24:08.740
show up for the job interview, because he's afraid. So who do you want to be? And so instead
00:24:13.300
of starting with the feeling, oh, I'm feeling afraid, you just ask the question, who do I want
00:24:17.680
to be? And then, you know, oftentimes, they end up answering their own question. Well, that's who I
00:24:21.760
want to be. So that's what I need to do. But you also raise a really good point, Brett, is that
00:24:26.520
oftentimes, instead of just asking people how they feel, when people start acting in a certain way,
00:24:32.600
they'll start doing, they'll start feeling it in a different way. So you go out and you exercise with
00:24:37.300
them, you go for a walk with them, you go out and you do a service project together in a community in
00:24:42.520
the community. And what happens is all of a sudden, as people start acting in that way, they actually
00:24:47.880
start feeling a different way. And you can really help help your friends. And when you when you help
00:24:52.740
pull them into the right kind of action with you. Okay. Well, one thing I loved about your book was
00:24:57.960
that you you wove in all these different authors and thinkers from ancient times and even modern times.
00:25:04.260
were there any thinkers or philosophers or writers in particular that really spoke to the issue of
00:25:11.780
resilience in a very articulate way that influenced a lot of your thinking when you're writing to your
00:25:17.340
friend? Well, so there were there were a lot of different thinkers, as you mentioned, who I drew on
00:25:23.500
and a few of them who are really solid who I'll point to. And I mean, there are, you know, for folks who pick up
00:25:29.280
the book, I think there's 150 some plus different sources. Yeah, it's awesome. Lots of places for
00:25:35.520
people to go for further for further reading. But you know, one one author who I really enjoyed was
00:25:42.000
Edith Hamilton. Edith Hamilton wrote a book called The Greek Way. And in The Greek Way, she actually
00:25:49.580
writes this wonderful chapter on Aeschylus. Aeschylus, you and some of our listeners will remember
00:25:56.280
Aeschylus is often considered to be the father of tragedy, the person who really started writing
00:26:01.080
tragedies. And what was interesting was, was Aeschylus was also a soldier. He was a soldier
00:26:07.120
who'd lived a lived a hard life. And he knew what it took to move through pain and create wisdom,
00:26:12.720
what it took to move through suffering and create strength. And so I think that everybody would benefit
00:26:18.360
from reading Edith Hamilton's book. I think you mentioned, you know, earlier when we were talking,
00:26:23.720
Alistair McIntyre's After Virtue, excellent book there, really gives people a solid sense for for
00:26:30.540
how Aristotle and others thought about virtue and how it how it's created. It's a hard read.
00:26:37.920
It's super dense. Yes, we should, we should warn people ahead of time. That's, that's a tough read,
00:26:43.880
you can you can bite it off in small, small chunks. You know, but one of the things I'd also say in
00:26:50.640
terms of reading, like where I direct people, is I'd say, you know, if you're really thinking about
00:26:56.180
how you build resilience in your life, one of the best things that you can do for yourself is to read
00:27:00.800
a really good biography. Because what a really good biography will always show you is that great
00:27:07.460
people suffered. Every great person who did anything worthwhile has suffered. Every great person has had
00:27:14.460
to do in indoor critics, and criticism. And, and always in a really good biography, you'll see
00:27:21.100
how that person actually put all of these different pieces of their life together to actually create
00:27:27.100
something meaningful. And so I'd encourage people as they're thinking about reading to also think about
00:27:31.340
picking up a really good biography, to understand how somebody else managed to build this kind of
00:27:37.900
resilience in their life. Well, I'm curious about this, and you don't have to answer it if you don't want
00:27:41.460
to. But from your own life, are there examples when you showed resilience, or unresilience? And
00:27:48.240
what did you take away from those personal experiences of yours?
00:27:53.000
Yeah, of course, there are. Look, you know, I mean, I think one of the nice things about reflecting on
00:27:58.760
your life, and, you know, even writing this book for me, is it helps you to reflect on all of these
00:28:03.840
different places where, you know, where you were courageous, and where you weren't, where you're
00:28:08.300
compassionate, and where you could have been more so, where you were resilient, and where you
00:28:12.760
weren't. I think what's also nice about resilience, I'll say, is that, you know, there are a lot of
00:28:19.680
virtues that you see, like, they happen in a moment. So somebody's either courageous or cowardly in a
00:28:24.820
particular moment. What's interesting about the virtue of resilience is that we see it manifest over
00:28:30.040
time. So you can go back and look at your life, and always, and say, you know what, I really,
00:28:35.700
I really learned something, or I haven't yet learned the lesson that I needed to learn
00:28:40.400
from that experience. And, you know, one of the things that I write about in the book that was
00:28:44.320
really hard for me, one of the hardest points in my life, was when I got divorced. I felt ashamed,
00:28:51.740
I felt like I'd let people down. This was one of those places in my life where I remember,
00:28:59.820
you know, I'd come home, I was a Navy SEAL at the time, I'd come home, I'd get in bed, and it was
00:29:06.540
hard to get out. And what that did for me, though, was it over time, it really helped me build an
00:29:13.340
empathy that, you know, even after having done all of that humanitarian work and working with kids and
00:29:19.100
families in tough situations, I think personally experiencing that kind of hardship really helped
00:29:25.580
build an empathy that I hope has made me a better leader and a better friend.
00:29:32.020
Fantastic. Well, Eric, where can people find out more about your book?
00:29:35.620
Well, Brett, the book is available. Certainly, we'd invite everybody to come out to ericgritens.com.
00:29:41.620
It's just E-R-I-C-G-R-E-I-T-E-N-S.com. You can go out to the website there. Also, it's available on
00:29:49.020
Amazon, Barnes & Noble. People can go out to their local bookstores. And at all those places,
00:29:55.320
they'll be able to learn more about resilience.
00:29:57.700
Fantastic. Well, Eric Gritens, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:30:00.860
Brett, it's my pleasure. Honored to be on with you. Thank you for having me.
00:30:04.340
Our guest today was Eric Gritens. He's the author of the book, Resilience,
00:30:07.300
Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life. It's available on Amazon.com. Do yourself a favor,
00:30:12.820
go pick up a copy. Like I said, best book I've read in a long time. I'm going to reread it again here
00:30:18.080
in a bit. I'd love to hear what you think about it. Tweet me at Art of Manliness. Leave a comment on the
00:30:23.440
podcast. If you share any tidbits that you enjoyed from it, go get it. It's a fantastic read. You can
00:30:28.200
also find out more information about Eric's work at ericgritens.com. Well, that wraps up another
00:30:34.680
edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the
00:30:39.040
Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And a great way you can show your support for the
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