Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...and Maybe the World

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Chapters 9-10

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Self-Worth and Dignity

The title of this book comes from one of the most practical and actionable pieces of advice McRaven offers his readers: starting the day with one consistent, small success—for example, making the bed. For McRaven, the experience of having to begin each day of SEAL training by doing a concrete thing well, with care, and without the expectation of praise offered him the chance to feel control over an environment that was otherwise designed to break down and dismiss his sense of dignity and self-worth. Making the bed was a positive achievement, something that could “give you solace, that can motivate you to begin your day, that can be a sense of pride in an oftentimes ugly world” (13). Possibly, this deep association between bed-making and self-respect is why McRaven makes so much out of deposed tyrant Saddam Hussein’s unwillingness to neaten his prison sheets.

McRaven describes SEAL training as a constant assault on the trainee’s self-esteem. Instructors psychologically manipulated recruits in a variety of ways—playing on their unfounded fears of sharks, berating them for being short, arbitrarily declaring them to having broken a rule and invoking the “sugar cookie” punishment of being covered in sand. This unceasing pressure was meant to weed people out, as instructors were unyielding in urging trainees to ring the quitting bell and leaving the program. In the face of this kind of training, which relied on antiquated ideas about stoicism and machismo, McRaven prized moments that allowed him and fellow trainees to reclaim their dignity. One he found particularly moving came at the end of Hell Week, as instructors again leaned on recruits to bow out of the training once and for all. To drown out the temptation to quit, one trainee began to sing. Rallying, the rest of the company joined in, forming a community bond: “[W]e had learned an important lesson: the power of one person to unite the group, the power of one person to inspire those around him, to give them hope” (64).

McRaven’s main source of self-worth became his inner resources of bravery and his commitment to the military. He describes his supreme faith in its workings: “Our goal, which we believed to be honorable and noble, gave us courage, and courage is a remarkable quality.” (51). McRaven encourages his readers to find a similarly meaningful goal, one whose rightness will be worth pursuing through any assault on one’s psychological makeup.

Dealing With Failure

Although McRaven is clearly very interested in the concept of failure and how to overcome it, none of his stories feature impassable obstacles. No matter the disappointment McRaven faces during this training and career, the outcome is always the same—by grinding through pain and by dedicating himself even more to his goals, he succeeds in unprecedented ways. The question simply becomes: how can I make my failure work to my advantage?

The pattern recurs frequently. When McRaven failed a headfirst climbing exercise, he simply decided to succeed despite his fear—and did so. When he and his swimming partner were in last place, their failure landed them in The Circus—a SEAL training punishment that heaps extra calisthenics and endurance training onto already grueling days: “What made The Circus so feared by the students was […] the knowledge that the day after The Circus you would be exhausted from the extra workout and so fatigued that you would fail to meet the standards again” (38). The millstone of The Circus produced one of two outcomes: forcing a trainee to quit, or forcing them to push themselves to extremes to overcome their flaws. Predictably, for McRaven, “The Circus, which had started as a punishment for failure, was making us stronger, faster, and more confident in the water” (39).

The most interesting example of failure is McRaven’s firing from the famed SEAL Team 6. Tellingly, despite the fact that being fired from a job is probably one of the more relatable events in McRaven’s otherwise incredibly outlier life, he does not explore the interpersonal dynamics that led to the dismissal, dissect the finer point of military command, or dive into his feelings at being let go. Instead, he describes approaching the aftermath of this disappointment with the same rigor that inevitably leads to success. Sure enough, after committing even harder to prove himself to the SEAL Team where he was reassigned, he emerged a successful leader and was eventually promoted to the head of all SEAL units. It is clear that during the reassignment, McRaven retooled his soft skills—a process that would have been useful to include in a self-help book—but he eschews describing exactly what he changed to make himself a better fit for the SEAL program.

The Necessity of Relying on Others

One of the arcs of McRaven’s experience in the Navy is his transformation from an individual to a deeply enmeshed member of a large team—the US military. When he decided to join up, he found himself dismissively judging a slight, small man in the recruitment office as too frail to compete. Soon enough, he learned that this was the recruiter he had come to see, Lieutenant Tom Norris, a highly decorated Navy SEAL and a recipient of the Medal of Honor. McRaven’s self-congratulatory bias that the thin man couldn’t possibly be better than him betrayed his misunderstanding of team dynamics. During SEAL training, McRaven learned to implicitly believe in his teammates instead of othering them.

While McRaven almost never acknowledges the socio-economic status that has enabled much of his life, he does stress that because life is always challenging, one absolutely needs to rely on others to get by. To illustrate that self-sufficiency is a myth, McRaven describes training exercises in which his SEAL training team needed to carry a rubber raft everywhere they went, even outside of the water. Success required the work of the whole team; moreover, when a member of the team wasn’t able to contribute, the rest would have to pitch in: When “one of the boat crew members was sick or injured, unable to give it 100 percent […], the other members picked up the slack. They paddled harder. They dug deeper” (16).

Reliance on others isn’t just for accomplishing goals—it is also key for having the kind of emotional support that allows for the kind of stoic bravery McRaven’s milieu requires. When he suffered near fatal injuries in a parachute jump gone wrong, McRaven needed round-the-clock care while he recuperated—care provided by his wife, who “reminded me of who I was […] She refused to let me feel sorry for myself. It was the kind of tough love that I needed” (19). Friends and loved ones, McRaven argues, are lifesavers and encouraging voices in times of darkness, keeping us from giving in to despair.