The world-changing power of making your bed
I sat next to a hero of mine at a dinner recently. A former head of the US Special Forces, Admiral William H McRaven served in dangerous missions as a Navy Seal for 37 years. He also ran the operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.
A decade ago, it seemed certain that this would be McRaven’s main claim to fame. But history can take curious turns. And if you google his name today, one of the first things that pops up is the criticism he correctly lobbed at Donald Trump in 2018, when the then US president attempted to politicise the military. (Trump hit back by saying McRaven should have caught bin Laden faster.)
And the other top search result linked to his name is to do with… beds.
A decade later, McRaven still “gets dozens of emails and letters every week” from people about the speech or book. “I find it amusing that when people stop me on the street, many of them have no idea I was even in the military. All they know is that I told them to make their bed,” he chuckles.
I found this thought-provoking in several ways. For a start, it shows that none of us knows quite how our legacy will be defined. No matter how important you are, timing and luck also play a crucial part.
Second, McRaven’s advice is further proof that if you want to communicate a lesson widely, it pays to keep it simple and personal. Military leaders know this instinctively, in a way that management consultants all too often do not.
Next, physical rituals matter. It sounds obvious but it is amazing how often we forget this, partly because we spend so much of our lives now operating in cyber space, but also because western culture tends to underrate physical work. Yet as both the anthropologist Simon Roberts and writer Charles Duhigg have shown, if we want to solve personal or collective problems, it sometimes pays to look to physical rituals and habits for the answer. There is, as Roberts said, power in creating habits that enable “not thinking”.
To use a small life hack of my own as illustration, I used to regularly lose travel documents on planes. (I once tossed all my family’s passports into a muffin bag because I was so exhausted.) I hunted for mental tricks to help me focus, then one day remembered how I used to tie my kids’ gloves to their coats when they were small, to stop the gloves getting lost. I decided to create a version of this for myself, and before every journey I now attach to my body an orange pouch containing my passport and keep it on until I arrive at the other end.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Gillian Tett
