Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business

Everyone 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!” They began shuffling across the pit. After ten minutes, however, it was clear this wasn’t working. 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. Recruits began yelling at each other to stop.

The leader ordered a pause. He turned to the man behind him. “Watch my shoulders,” he yelled through his gas mask. The leader shrugged his left shoulder, and then his right. By watching the rhythm of the leader, the recruit behind him could coordinate how to lift the boards. The only problem with this idea was that it violated one of the ground rules. 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. 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. 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. They crossed the field 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 me. “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.”

Twenty-four hours and another dozen obstacles later, Quintanilla’s platoon gathered at the base of the Crucible’s final challenge, a long, steep hill they called the Grim Reaper. “You don’t have to help each other during the Reaper,” Krulak said. “I’ve seen that happen before. Recruits fall down, and they don’t have buddies, so they get left behind.”

Quintanilla had been marching for two days by this point. He had slept less than four hours. 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,” he told me. “One person had his arm in a sling.” As the group began walking up the mountain, recruits kept stumbling. They were all so exhausted they moved as if in slow motion, hardly making any progress. So they began linking up, arm in arm, to prevent one another from sliding down the incline.

“Why are you doing this?” Quintanilla’s pack buddy wheezed at him, lapsing into a call-and-response they had practiced on hikes. When things are at their most miserable, their drill instructors had said, they should ask each other questions that begin with “why.”

“To become a Marine and build a better life for my family,” Quintanilla said.

His wife had given birth a week earlier to a daughter, Zoey. He had been allowed to speak to her for a total of five minutes by telephone after the delivery. It was his only contact with the outside world in almost two months. If he finished the Crucible, he would see his wife and new child.

If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier, Quintanilla’s drill instructors had told him. That’s why they asked each other questions starting with “why.” Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.

The platoon summited the last peak as the sun crested, and staggered to a clearing with a flagpole. Everyone went still. They were finally done. The Crucible was over. A drill instructor walked through their formation, pausing before each man to place the service’s insignia, the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, in their hands. They were officially marines.

“You think boot camp is going to be all screaming and fighting,” Quintanilla told me. “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.”

Basic training, like the Marine Corps career itself, offers few material rewards. A Marine’s starting salary is $17,616 a year. However, the Corps has one of the highest 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 Quintanilla, had no idea how to generate the motivation and self-direction needed to take control of their lives. Since Krulak’s reforms, the Corps’ retention of new recruits and the performance scores of new marines have both increased by more than 20 percent. Surveys indicate that the average recruit’s internal locus of control increases significantly during basic training. Delgado’s experiments were a start to understanding motivation. The Marines complement those insights by helping us understand how to teach drive to people who aren’t practiced in self-determination: If you give people an opportunity to feel a sense of control and let them practice making choices, they can learn to exert willpower. Once people know how to make self-directed choices into a habit, motivation becomes more automatic.

Moreover, to teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals. That’s the reason recruits ask each other “why”—because it shows them how to link small tasks to larger aspirations.

The significance of this insight can be seen in a series of studies conducted in nursing homes in the 1990s. Researchers were studying why some seniors thrived inside such facilities, while others experienced rapid physical and mental declines. A critical difference, the researchers determined, was that the seniors who flourished made choices that rebelled against the rigid schedules, set menus, and strict rules that the nursing homes tried to force upon them.

Some researchers referred to such residents as “subversives,” because so many of their decisions manifested as small rebellions against the status quo. One group at a Santa Fe nursing home, for instance, started every meal by trading food items among themselves in order to construct meals of their own design rather than placidly accept what had been served to them. One resident told a researcher that he always gave his cake away because, even though he liked cake, he would “rather eat a second-class meal that I have chosen.”

A group of residents at a nursing home in Little Rock violated the institution’s rules by moving furniture around to personalize their bedrooms. Because wardrobes were attached to the walls, they used a crowbar—appropriated from a tool closet—to wrench their dressers free. In response, an administrator called a meeting and said there was no need to undertake independent redecorations; if the residents needed help, the staff would provide it. The residents informed the administrator that they didn’t want any assistance, didn’t need permission, and intended to continue doing whatever they damn well pleased.

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