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

McRaven’s depiction of SEAL training paints a picture of physical exertion punctuated with intense psychological manipulation. In his telling, instructors are always digging into recruits’ deepest insecurities, fears, and anxieties—not to assuage or work through these weaknesses, but to exploit them in ways that either harden the men or force them into breakdown. Here, we see the bookends of this approach, as instructors cajole, threaten, harass, or otherwise try to compel trainees to quit at the start of the program and at its conclusion. McRaven focuses on the team-building aspect of this kind of psychological torment, as soldiers band together in song to drown out the voices of their instructors during Hell Week. In a way, this experience of a kind of butterfly effect—a small act that results in a massive change—echoes the book’s title and its first chapter’s insistence on the importance of doing small things with attention and care. However, McRaven does not address what happens to those who ring the bell, accepting the machismo-laced prejudice that they were quitters who were not worthy. He also does not consider whether the experience of being relentlessly bullied during this program is what made him prone to seeing threats in places where they don’t seem to exist—for example, in the imprisoned Saddam Hussein, who no longer had any physical or political power at his disposal.

McRaven is fully bought into his experience and its stated mission. He values his SEAL training as a period full of life lessons he believes are both relatable and exportable to civilian life. No matter how seemingly unnecessary the endurance tests the trainees were put through, McRaven never questions them or the system that underlies them. Because he managed to succeed in the training, he views it as a positive experience—a perspective that lines up with the traditional view that masculinity demands an unemotive, stoic, and generally suppressive approach to life. Even when he faces the most dire consequences of war—the killing and maiming of young men and women sent into combat—McRaven prides himself and others on their ability to withstand without complaint. McRaven commends the man whose legs were blown off for being willing to not only make this sacrifice, but also for never showing the emotional and psychological toll such a loss must have entailed. McRaven takes this performance of stoicism at face value, never asking what psychic damage the man will have to contend with down the road (McRaven’s world seems untouched by PTSD, for example), or whether why such sacrifice was required in the first place.