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

Part of the premise of McRaven’s book is baked right into the title. The subtitle Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe the World immediately clarifies that nothing groundbreaking will be discussed, but that the advice within will be vivid and easy to call to mind. The title thus appropriately sets expectations: McRaven gives the reader 10 simple aphorisms for improving their daily life. Less immediately relatable are the stories McRaven uses to illustrate his 10 pieces of advice: Consistently drawn from his military training or service, they offer niche situations that not all readers will be able to extrapolate to civilian life. For instance, in Chapter 2, he describes carrying a rubber raft around with a team of Navy SEAL trainees. However, he uses these not immediately applicable vignettes to broaden out to universal lessons. In this case, his point is that when we are weak, sick, or tired, we need to be able to rely on others to help lift us up and carry us where we need to go.

McRaven almost always assumes that his readers are in the same socio-economic bracket as he is, taking for granted financial security and general life stability. For example, McRaven’s description of his recovery from a horrific parachuting injury is a beautiful tribute to the importance of friends and family during difficult times, but it does not explore that this emotional support buoyed a man whose physical and medical needs were taken care of for free by the US government—a reader might imagine someone with analogously terrible injuries from a car accident needing more than friends if lacking sufficient medical insurance or access to proper care.

The book has come in for some criticism because of McRaven’s examples. The first chapter, “Start Your Day with a Task Completed,” focuses on the need to begin each morning on the right foot, in this case by intentionally accomplishing something small and within one’s control. McRaven recommends making your bed as soon as you wake up. He argues that the feeling of having achieved something, even something as insignificant as a made bed, can set you up for success by giving you a sense of ownership over your environment. However, McRaven’s anecdotal illustration seems to belie this point: He points out that ousted Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein never made his bed while in US prison; for him, this is evidence of an undisciplined individual ruled by vice and his own passions—though readers may wonder whether a captured deposed tyrant POW could really have turned his life around by neatening his prison sheets. Prisons are not typically designed to give the incarcerated feelings of control—an idea McRaven does not address. A satirical review in the British newspaper The Guardian made much of this odd example (John Crace. “Make Your Bed.” The Guardian, July 30, 2017). McRaven stresses that readers should not see making one’s bed as something above and beyond. His Navy instructor simply expected it to be done, acknowledging McRaven meeting this standard with a simple nod of the head. Making the bed was not an opportunity for praise—it barely deserved any attention at all. This is an important feature of the process: We should expect ourselves to do the little things correctly and well, mostly for our own sake and to make our own lives better, rather than out of a misplaced sense of pride or desire to be praised.