1: When Eric Quintanilla told his wife and his mother he was considering joining the Marines, neither thought it was a good idea.
The night before, he talked to a former high school classmate at a party. That friend had just finished basic training and was twenty pounds lighter and ripped, Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.
“He was telling jokes and hitting on girls,” Eric recalls.
Eric, on the other hand, felt lost. After graduating from high school five years earlier, he had enrolled in a community college in his hometown about an hour south of Chicago.
He thought getting an associate’s degree might help him get a position at a cellphone store in the mall.
No such luck. “I filled out, I don’t know, like ten applications,” Eric said. “But I never heard back from anyone.”
Eventually, he took a part-time job at a hobby supply shop while also filling in as an ice truck driver when the regular guy was sick or on vacation. At night, he played World of Warcraft.
“This wasn’t how Eric had envisioned his life. He was ready for something better,” Charles writes.
“He decided to propose to the girl he had been dating since high school. The wedding was fantastic. Afterward, though, he was still in the same place. And then his wife got pregnant.”
Now 23, Eric sat at his kitchen table with a pen and pad of paper. He drew a line down the middle. On the left side, he wrote “Marine Corps.” On the right, he tried to fill in his other options.
All he could come up with was “Get promoted at the hobby store.”
2: Cut to five months later. It’s the middle of the night. Eric is in a room with eighty other young men at the San Diego Marine Corps Recruit Depot.
He’s just had his head shaved and his blood type tested. His civilian clothes have been replaced with fatigues.
“The thirteen-week boot camp Eric entered in 2010 was a relatively new experiment in the Corps’ 235-year-old quest to manufacture the perfect marine,” Charles writes.
“For most of its history,” he notes, “the service’s training program had focused on molding rowdy teenagers into disciplined troops.”
But back in the mid-1990s, a fifty-three-year-old general, Charles C. Krulak, had been promoted to commandant, the Marines’ top position.
He believed basic training needed to change.
“We were seeing much weaker applicants,” Charles told Charles. “A lot of these kids didn’t just need discipline, they needed a mental makeover. They’d never belonged to a sports team, they’d never had a real job, they’d never done anything. They didn’t even have the vocabulary for ambition. They’d followed instructions their whole life.”
Which was a real issue for the Marines. Because they needed soldiers who could make independent decisions.
Today’s soldiers fight in far-away places like Somalia and Baghdad. “Rules and tactics change unpredictably and marines often have to decide—on their own and in real time—the best course of action,” author Charles notes.
“We’re the first to arrive and the last to leave,” General Krulak says. “We need extreme self-starters.”
He began spending time with psychologists and psychiatrists, trying to answer one question: How do we do a better job teaching these recruits to think for themselves?
As General Krulak reviewed the research on self-motivation, one finding that stood out came from a military study conducted years earlier, which indicated that the most successful Marines were those with a strong “internal locus of control”—a belief that they could influence their lives through their choices.
“Locus of control has been a major topic of study within psychology since the 1950s,” Charles writes. “Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence.
Exhibit one: “A student with a strong internal locus of control,” he notes, “will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts.”
Exhibit two: “A salesman with an internal locus of control,” Charles explains, “will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune.”
“Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a group of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012.
The research shows that those who have an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction.
Contrast these findings with those of people with an “external locus of control,” who believe life is primarily influenced by events outside their control.
This mindset is equated with “higher levels of stress, [often] because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities,” the team of psychologists noted.
The good news? Research indicates you can increase your locus of control through training and feedback.
One well-known experiment conducted by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck in 1998 presented 128 fifth graders with a series of challenging puzzles.
All of the students were told they had scored very well.
Half of them were also told, “You must have worked hard at these problems.”
“Telling fifth graders they have worked hard has been shown to activate their internal locus of control,” Charles writes, “because hard work is something we decide to do.”
The other half of the students were told, “You must be really smart at these problems.”
“Complimenting students on their intelligence activates an external locus of control,” he observes.
“Most fifth graders don’t believe they can choose how smart they are. . . so telling young people they are smart reinforces their belief that success or failure is based on factors outside of their control.”
Next, all the students were given another set of puzzles with different levels of difficulty.
“The students who had been praised for their intelligence—who had been primed to think in terms of things they could not influence,” Charles writes, “were much more likely to focus on the easier puzzles during the second round of play, even though they had been complimented for being smart.
“They were less motivated to push themselves. They later said the experiment wasn’t much fun.”
The results were very different for the students who were praised for working hard. This group spent more time on the harder puzzles and scored better. They also reported having a great time doing so.
“Internal locus of control is a learned skill,” Carol says. “Training is helpful, because if you put people in situations where they can practice feeling in control. . . , then people can start building habits that make them feel like they’re in charge of their own lives—and the more they feel that way, the more they really are in control of themselves.”
Based on research findings, General Krulak redesigned basic training to require trainees to make decisions and take responsibility for their choices.
“Today we call it teaching ‘a bias toward action,’” he says. “The idea is that once recruits have taken control of a few situations, they start to learn how good it feels.
“We never tell anyone they’re a natural-born leader. ‘Natural born’ means it’s outside your control,” General Krulak states. “Instead, we teach them that leadership is learned; it’s the product of effort.
“We push recruits to experience that thrill of taking control, of feeling the rush of being in charge,” he says. “Once we get them addicted to that, they’re hooked.”
During boot camp, Eric and the other new recruits experienced long days of forced marches, endless sit-ups and push-ups, and tedious rifle drills. Instructors screamed at them constantly. (“We’ve got an image to uphold,” General Krulak says.)
But in addition to those activities, the recruits also spent time in situations that forced them to make decisions and take control.
One example? Eric and his platoon were told to clean the mess hall.
“The recruits had no idea how,” Charles writes. “They didn’t know where the cleaning supplies were located or how the industrial dishwasher worked. Lunch had just ended, and they weren’t sure if they were supposed to wrap the leftovers or throw them away.
“Whenever someone approached a drill instructor for advice, all he received was a scowl. So the platoon began making choices. The potato salad got tossed, the leftover hamburgers went into the fridge, and the dishwasher was loaded with so much detergent that suds soon covered the floor.”
Altogether, the exercise took three and a half hours. “They mistakenly threw away edible food, accidentally turned off the ice cream freezer, and somehow managed to misplace two dozen forks,” Charles shares.
“When they were done, however, their drill instructor approached the smallest, shyest member of the platoon and said he had noticed how the recruit had asserted himself when a decision was needed on where to put the ketchup.
“In truth,” Charles explains, “it was pretty obvious where the ketchup should have gone. There was a huge set of shelves containing nothing but ketchup bottles. But the shy recruit beamed as he was praised.”
“I hand out a number of compliments, and all of them are designed to be unexpected,” said Sergeant Dennis Joy, a prototypical intimidating drill instructor who gave Charles a tour of the Recruit Depot.
“You’ll never get rewarded for doing what’s easy for you. If you’re an athlete, I’ll never compliment you on a good run. Only the small guy gets congratulated for running fast. Only the shy guy gets recognized for stepping into a leadership role. We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”
3: The Crucible was the cornerstone of General Krulak’s redesigned basic training, a punishing three-day challenge at the end of boot camp.
Eric and his platoon dreaded the Crucible. They whispered about it at night in the barracks. Rumors and speculation abounded, including a widespread story that a recruit from the previous year had lost a limb.
The Crucible began on a Tuesday morning at 2 am. Instructors noisily burst into the barracks.
“Prepare to march, crawl, and climb across fifty miles of obstacle courses,” they were told.
Each soldier carried thirty pounds of gear. “They had only two meals apiece to last fifty-four hours,” Charles notes.
“At most, they could hope for just a few hours of sleep. Injuries were expected. Anyone who stopped moving or lagged too far behind, they were told, would be dropped from the Corps.”
Halfway through the Crucible, the recruits encountered a task called Sergeant Timmerman’s Tank.
“The enemy has chemically contaminated this area,” a drill instructor shouted, pointing to a pit the size of a football field. “You must cross it while wearing full gear and gas masks. If a recruit touches the ground, you have failed and must start over!
“If you spend longer than sixty minutes in the pit, you have failed and must start over!
“You must obey your team leader! I repeat: You may not proceed without a direct verbal order from the team leader. You must hear a command before you act, otherwise you have failed and must start over!”
Eric’s team formed a circle and used a technique they had learned in basic training.
“What’s our objective?” one recruit said.
“To cross the pit,” another replied.
“How do we use the boards?” another recruit said, pointing to planks with ropes attached.
“We could lay them end to end,” someone answered.
The team leader ordered the team to test this idea along the pit’s edge.
“They stood on one board while hauling the other forward,” Charles writes. “No one could keep their balance. The circle reformed.”
“How do we use the ropes?” a recruit asked.
“To lift the planks,” another said. What if they stood on both boards simultaneously as if they were on skis and then used the ropes to lift each piece in tandem?
The soldiers put on their gas masks and stood on the boards with the leader at the front.
“Left!” he shouted as recruits pulled one of the planks slightly forward. “Right!”
The platoon started to shuffle across the pit.
“After ten minutes, however, it was clear this wasn’t working,” Charles shares. “Some people were lifting too quickly, others were pushing the boards too far.
“And because they were all wearing gas masks, it was impossible to hear the leader’s commands. They had already gone too far to turn around—but at this rate, crossing would take hours.”
“Stop!” several of the soldiers screamed.
The leader paused and turned to look at the man behind him. “Watch my shoulders,” he yelled through his gas mask.
“The leader shrugged his left shoulder, and then his right,” Charles writes. “By watching the rhythm of the leader, the recruit behind him could coordinate how to lift the boards.”
The only problem with this approach? It “violated one of the ground rules,” he notes. “Recruits had been told they could not act until they heard a verbal command from their team leader.
“But with their gas masks on, no one could really hear anything,” Charles observes. “However, there was no other way to proceed. So the team leader began shrugging and swinging his arms while screaming orders.
“No one caught on at first, so he began yelling one of the songs they had learned on long marches,” he writes.
“The recruit behind him could make out enough of what he was singing to join in. His neighbor did the same. Eventually, they were all singing and shrugging and swinging in tandem.”
What happened next? The platoon successfully crossed the pit in twenty-eight minutes.
“Technically, we could send them back to start over because each person didn’t hear a direct verbal command from the team leader,” a drill sergeant later told Charles.
“But that’s the point of the exercise: We know you can’t hear anything with the gas masks on. The only way to get across the pit is to figure out some workaround. We’re trying to teach them that you can’t just obey orders. You have to take control and figure things out for yourself.”
Another day and another dozen or so obstacles later, Eric and his colleagues were positioned for the Crucible’s final challenge: A long, steep hill called the Grim Reaper.
“You don’t have to help each other during the Reaper,” General Krulak says. “I’ve seen that happen before. Recruits fall down, and they don’t have buddies, so they get left behind.”
Eric and the platoon had been marching nonstop for two days. “He had slept less than four hours,” Charles writes. “His face was numb, and his hands were covered with blisters and cuts from carrying water-filled drums across obstacles.
“There were guys throwing up at the Reaper,” Eric says. “One person had his arm in a sling.”
Recruits were stumbling as they walked up the steep hill. “They were all so exhausted they moved as if in slow motion, hardly making any progress,” Charles shares.
“So they began linking up, arm in arm, to prevent one another from sliding down the incline.”
“Why are you doing this?” Eric’s pack buddy huffed at him, using the call-and-response technique they had practiced on hikes: When things were at their most difficult, their drill instructors had told them to ask each other questions that began with “why.”
“To become a Marine and build a better life for my family,” Eric said.
A week earlier, his wife had given birth to their daughter, Zoey. Eric was allowed five minutes to speak to her after the delivery. That was his only contact with the outside world in nearly two months.
Eric knew that if he finished the Crucible, he would be able to see his wife and baby.
“If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier,” the drill instructors said. “That’s why they asked each other questions starting with ‘why.'”
The lesson for us? When we turn a chore into a meaningful decision, we create self-motivation.
“The platoon summited the last peak as the sun crested, and staggered to a clearing with a flagpole,” Charles writes.
“Everyone went still. They were finally done. The Crucible was over.”
They lined up in formation as a drill instructor paused in front of each soldier to place the service’s insignia, the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, in their hands.
It was official: They were Marines.
“You think boot camp is going to be all screaming and fighting,” Eric recalls. “But it’s not. It’s not like that at all. It’s more about learning how to make yourself do things you thought you couldn’t do. It’s really emotional, actually.”
A Marine’s starting salary is $ 17,616 a year. However, the Corps has one of the best career satisfaction rates.
“The training the Corps provides to roughly forty thousand recruits each year has transformed the lives of millions of people who, like Eric, had no idea how to generate the motivation and self-direction needed to take control of their lives,” Charles explains.
Since General Krulak’s reforms, both the overall retention rate for new recruits and the performance scores of new Marines have increased by more than 20 percent.
“Surveys indicate,” Charles writes, “that the average recruit’s internal locus of control increases significantly during basic training.”
This occurs when we develop “a mental habit of transforming chores into meaningful choices, when we assert that we have authority over our lives,” he explains.
Eric served in the Marine Corps for three years. He left feeling he was finally ready for real life.
“He got another job, but the lack of camaraderie among his colleagues was disappointing. No one seemed motivated to excel,” Charles writes.
Two years later, he reenlisted. “I missed that constant reminder that I can do anything,” Eric says. “I missed people pushing me to choose a better me.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: When I face a difficult task, do I see it as something I have to do—or as a choice connected to a purpose that matters to me?
Action: Identify one chore, obligation, or challenge I’m facing this week. Then ask: “Why does this matter?” Connect it to a person, value, or goal I care deeply about.