TL;DR
Admiral William McRaven’s short book of ten lessons from Navy SEAL training, grown out of a 2014 commencement speech that tens of millions of people have watched. He wrote it after commanding U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill.
In May 2014, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command flew from Tampa to Austin to give a commencement speech at the University of Texas, his alma mater. He told the graduates that if they wanted to change the world, they should start by making their bed.
The speech spread far past that stadium.
By late 2022 it had been viewed nearly 60 million times on YouTube. William McRaven turned it into Make Your Bed. Grand Central Publishing released it in April 2017, and it went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
What is Make Your Bed about?
Ten lessons, each drawn from SEAL training.
Start the day with a task completed. You can’t paddle the boat alone. Only the size of your heart matters. Life isn’t fair, so keep going. Failure can make you stronger. Dare greatly, stand up to bullies, rise to the occasion when things are at their worst, give people hope, and never quit.
Each chapter pairs a lesson with stories from McRaven’s training and his career, and with people he served alongside. Several are about men nobody expected to finish SEAL training who finished anyway, and several are about his own mistakes. The full text of the original speech closes the book, so a reader can see how a few minutes at a podium became ten chapters.
It’s short, about 130 pages. You can read it in an evening.
Who is William McRaven?
His career wasn’t a straight line up. He served with SEAL Team Six in the early 1980s and was removed from it in 1983. He rebuilt from there, one command at a time.
McRaven was commissioned through the University of Texas Navy ROTC program in 1977 and finished SEAL training the next year. He commanded SEAL Team Three, led Joint Special Operations Command from 2008 to 2011, a stretch that included the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and then commanded U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill from 2011 to 2014. After retiring as a four-star admiral he served as chancellor of the University of Texas System until 2018. He lives in Austin.
How did a commencement speech become Make Your Bed?
A strong speech is already an outline. McRaven had ten points, a story for each and a closing line people remembered. He kept that structure and let every point grow into a chapter.
Plenty of retired leaders give the same talk to every audience that invites them. Their book is sitting in their notes.
It shows how far a leadership book can travel from a single strong idea and a few hundred words. McRaven didn’t set out to write a memoir. He took one speech, found the ten lessons inside it and built a book small enough to give as a gift. He also wrote a full memoir later, Sea Stories. That’s a common path. A short leadership book builds an audience, and the longer book follows.
Keep reading
Hiring a ghostwriter for a retired general’s or admiral’s leadership book: how senior military leaders turn a career into a book, and what has to stay out.
