Navy Motivational Quotes

The only easy day was yesterday.

It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.

First gain the victory and then make the best use of it you can.

War is not just the shower of bullets and bombs from both sides, it is also the shower of blood and bones on both sides.

You don't have to make it big, but you do have to make a big impact.

Strength lies not in defence but in attack.

You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it” – There are situations in life where you will simply need to grit your teeth and hit the ground running.

Leading large groups of people, motivating and inspiring them to accomplish a common goal regardless of adversity or danger—that’s the essence of dynamic leadership.

Self-discipline is always going to be an unreachable target until you tackle the question of ‘why’. Once you nail down your motivation and keep it clear in the front of your mind, you can move to making all of your dreams turn into realities.

The object of this establishment is seducing; the motive to it is laudable. But is it not safer to adhere to a right principle, and trust to its consequences, than confide in the reasoning however specious in favor of a wrong one? Look thro' the armies and navies of the world, and say whether in the appointment of their ministers of religion, the spiritual interest of the flocks or the temporal interest of the Shepherd be most in view?

[F]or a time of public need they thought that there was no man like him. During the peace while he was at the head of affairs he ruled with prudence; under his guidance Athens was safe, and reached the height of her greatness in his time. When the war began he showed that here too he had formed a true estimate of the Athenian power. He survived the commencement of hostilities two years and six months; and, after his death, his foresight was even better appreciated than during his life. For he had told the Athenians that if they would be patient and would attend to their navy, and not seek to enlarge their dominion while the war was going on, nor imperil the existence of the city, they would be victorious; but they did all that he told them not to do, and in matters which seemingly had nothing to do with the war, from motives of private ambition and private interest they adopted a policy which had disastrous effects in respect both of themselves and of their allies; their measures, had they been successful, would only have brought honour and profit to individuals, and, when unsuccessful, crippled the city in the conduct of the war. (Book 2 Chapter 65.4-7)

As recounted in his book It’s Your Ship, one of Captain Abrashoff’s first moves was to interview every one of the 310 crew members on the ship. He learned their personal histories and their motivations for joining the navy, and he sought their opinions about the Benfold: What do you like most? Least? What would you change if you could?

You have to have drive and commitment - as well as an honest sense of what is and isn't possible.

I have found that the best way to get through tough times is to surround myself with positive people. If you spend time around people who are weak of always feel sorry for themselves, it's bound to rub off on you. Always look forward, never back.

There are times when you have to put yourself at a disadvantage in order to accomplish a larger mission and secure a longer-tern goal.

A leader must be close with subordinates but not too close. The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people—their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself. Leaders must never get so close that the team forgets who is in charge.

Want to know a cool word my mom taught me today? It’s the answer to life’s problems.” “Sure.” “Happenstance,” Charlie said matter of fact. “Happen what?” “Happenstance,” Charlie said again, this time slower and enunciating. “My mom said that happenstance is like a coincidence. It’s another way of saying that sometimes things happen to you that you can’t control.” “Okay?” “My mom says circumstances are environmental. The circumstance or condition affects an event. Or it’s the effect of an event. That’s a happenstance. People confuse the two all the time but they’re not the same thing. Regardless, she said that the outcome is still up to us to decide.

Happenstance. Things happen. That doesn’t mean you don’t have control of the outcome of what happens. You can choose to let it decide what happens for you or you can choose to make decisions to change your life. Get it?

A hundred-dollars goes a long way when you’re following your dreams,” Sofia said kindly.

consciously modeled himself after them. His specialty, if he could be said to have one, was in nurturing and managing the navy’s human capital. His real genius was as a leader, a manager, a judge, and a motivator of men.

Last, you’ve got to do more leading and less managing. Be a visible and motivating presence.

Moral courage is what you do when no one is watching. It relies heavily on trust and doing what is right no matter who is around. During the SEAL selection process someone is always watching. Problem solving is also paramount to being a SEAL. Survival when the bullets start flying is 100% dependent on your ability to think accurately and create sound judgment. Teamability is defined by how well an individual works in the team environment. It requires that all members put the mission and team before themselves. SEALs are taught to prioritize team issues

In life you will face a lot of Circuses. You will pay for your failures. But, if you persevere, if you let those failures teach you and strengthen you, then you will be prepared to handle life’s toughest moments. July 1983 was one of those tough moments. As I stood before the commanding officer, I thought my career as a Navy SEAL was over. I had just been relieved of my SEAL squadron, fired for trying to change the way my squadron was organized, trained, and conducted missions. There were some magnificent officers and enlisted men in the organization, some of the most professional warriors I had ever been around. However, much of the culture was still rooted in the Vietnam era, and I thought it was time for a change. As I was to find out, change is never easy, particularly for the person in charge. Fortunately, even though I was fired, my commanding officer allowed me to transfer to another SEAL Team, but my reputation as a SEAL officer was severely damaged. Everywhere I went, other officers and enlisted men knew I had failed, and every day there were whispers and subtle reminders that maybe I wasn’t up to the task of being a SEAL. At that point in my career I had two options: quit and move on to civilian life, which seemed like the logical choice in light of my recent Officer Fitness Report, or weather the storm and prove to others and myself that I was a good SEAL officer. I chose the latter. Soon after being fired, I was given a second chance, an opportunity to deploy overseas as the Officer in Charge of a SEAL platoon. Most of the time on that overseas deployment we were in remote locations, isolated and on our own. I took advantage of the opportunity to show that I could still lead. When you live in close quarters with twelve SEALs there isn’t anywhere to hide. They know if you are giving 100 percent on the morning workout. They see when you are first in line to jump out of the airplane and last in line to get the chow. They watch you clean your weapon, check your radio, read the intelligence, and prepare your mission briefs. They know when you have worked all night preparing for tomorrow’s training. As month after month of the overseas deployment wore on, I used my previous failure as motivation to outwork, outhustle, and outperform everyone in the platoon. I sometimes fell short of being the best, but I never fell short of giving it my best. In time, I regained the respect of my men. Several years later I was selected to command a SEAL Team of my own. Eventually I would go on to command all the SEALs on the West Coast.

The harder you are on yourself, the easier life is on you. Or, as they say in the Navy Seals, the more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war.

One winter in Manila in the mid-1930s, Wylie walked into the wardroom of his ship, the heavy cruiser Augusta (Captain Chester W. Nimitz commanding), and encountered a “fist-banging argument” between two of the ship’s up-and-coming young officers. At issue was what it took to become skilled at rifle or pistol marksmanship. One officer, Lloyd Mustin, said that only someone born with a special gift could learn to do it well. The other, a marine named Lewis B. Puller, said, “I can take any dumb son of a bitch and teach him to shoot.” Mustin would go on to become one of the Navy’s pioneers in radar-controlled gunnery. Puller would ascend to general, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history. Gesturing to Wylie standing in the doorway, Chesty Puller declared, “I can even teach him.” A ten-dollar bet ensued. The next time the Augusta’s marine detachment found time to do their annual qualifications at the rifle range, Wylie was Puller’s special guest. And by the end of the experiment, he was the proud owner of a Marine medal designating him an expert rifleman. The experience helped Wylie understand both native gifts and teachable skills and predisposed him to work with the rural kids under him. Now he could smile when the sighting of an aircraft approaching at a distant but undetermined range came through the Fletcher’s bridge phones as, “Hey, Cap’n, here’s another one of them thar aero-planes, but don’t you fret none. She’s a fur piece yet.” Wylie was a good enough leader to appreciate what the recruits from the countryside brought to the game. “They were highly motivated,” he said. “They just came to fight.

The awareness that one was in the presence of such an insurgent came at a pheromonal level. He didn’t have to be brash or intimidating. If he had the right qualities, they carried through the air around him despite his quietude. Some men were fiery and motivational, leading with a barely restrained recklessness and a demeanor of perpetually fresh anger. Others were intellectual warriors, brains in circuit with the matrix in space where vectors flew toward other vectors and the results of battle followed from the nature of their intersections. The fighter’s way was elemental. It was not possible to cultivate it reliably in an academic meritocracy, or to gauge it by class rank. The woodsmen with their squirrel guns who beat the British at New Orleans rallied to Andrew Jackson’s readiness to fury, a scent that inspired fear, his instinct to abandon prudence and seize a sudden opening to kill.

Perry had come to end those offenses — but more importantly to secure trading opportunities and coaling facilities and to awaken the Japanese to their "Christian obligation to join the family of Christendom," which the secretary of the Navy had confided was the mission's underlying motive.

Putting flow-prone kids into high-flow environments means a lot of flow. Arming them with advanced flow-hacking techniques means even more. All this flow makes the activity deeply rewarding, both fulfilling a child’s innate need for autonomy, mastery, and purpose and further increasing their sense of intrinsic motivation. When Tom Schaar says, “I love being with my friends at the skate park — that’s the greatest feeling,” what he’s saying is no one has to force him to practice, the autotelic nature of the activity — the fact that it drives him into flow — is the source code of his motivation.

Fortunately for Hypo, and the navy, and the United States, Chester Nimitz was not such an admiral. He was briefed each morning at eight o’clock by his fleet intelligence officer, Lieutenant Commander Edwin Layton. Layton also had a standing invitation to walk into Nimitz’s office at any hour of any day if he believed he had important information for the C-in-C. (No one else on the staff, except perhaps the chief of staff, had this privilege.) Hypo provided a daily briefing to Layton, who in turn drew on other sources and briefed Nimitz. Layton and Rochefort had known one another when both men were stationed in Tokyo as language officers in the 1920s. They had shared in the long trial of learning Japanese. They counted one another as friends, and this tended to smooth the contours of their professional partnership, which might otherwise had been complicated by the organizational rivalry between the Fourteenth Naval District (of which Hypo was a part) and the Pacific Fleet staff. Nimitz paid close attention to all the intelligence products that crossed his desk. On his first day as CINCPAC, he told Layton, “I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo of my staff. I want your every thought, every instinct as you believe Admiral Nagumo might have them. You are to see the war, their operations, their aims, from the Japanese viewpoint and keep me advised what you are thinking about, what you are doing, and what purpose, what strategy, motivates your operations. If you can do this, you will give me the kind of information needed to win this war.

There is no bigger battle you will fight in all your life than the war against yourself. It is only you that can hold you back from accomplishing great things, so you need to learn how to enable both your mind and body to work together in the same direction. Plenty of people have the capability to reach their goals, but few are able to get out of their own way in order to make it happen.

A man without purpose is just spending time.

encountered yesterday, you will crumble in the face of adversity. Nothing in life ever stays the same for long – you are always either headed on an uphill or downhill trajectory. Quite simply, if today is easier than yesterday, you are headed on a downhill trajectory by definition. If you wish to continue climbing until you reach your current goals and set new ones, you need to live by the motto of yesterday being your last easy day.

definition. If you wish to continue climbing until you reach your current goals and set new ones, you need to live by the motto of yesterday being your last easy day.

All maritime nations have vital interests beyond their borders. All maritime nations, then, to the extent that they project power over an international commons, are empires. But the degree of that projection, its character and the actual motives animating it, matter. The United States was an empire not for the purpose of subjugation or exploitation, but for the aspiration of advancing the expressly articulated ideals of the United Nations, the Atlantic Charter, and NATO: namely, the right of nations to stand free from outside coercion or subversion of peoples to chart their own destiny.

BESIDES PROVIDING LEGITIMATE outlets for aggression, the gratification of obsessive tendencies and reassurances about virility, armies and navies also cater for another basic human motive: the need to achieve.

I don’t worry about motivation, because motivation comes and goes. It’s just a feeling. You might feel motivated to do something, and you might not. The thing that keeps you on course and keeps you on the warrior path isn’t motivation. It is discipline. Discipline gets you out of bed. Discipline gets you onto the pull-up bar. Discipline gets you to grind it out in jiu-jitsu class. If you do those things only when you are motivated to do them, you might do them only fifty percent of the time. Sure, it’s nice when motivation is there, but you can’t count on motivation. You have to rely on the personal discipline you develop. Like you said: Discipline equals freedom. Got it?

I listened to the plan. When I understood the overall idea and the complexity it involved, I finally commented, “Lieutenant, I appreciate your motivation to get out there and get after it. But perhaps—at least for these first few patrols—we need to simplify this a little bit.