“Honey,” she told him, “you have to give them a reason to hire you. Just tell them what you’re excited about.”
The next day, when the store manager asked him why he wanted to sell T-Mobile phones, Quintanilla froze. “I don’t know,” he said. It was the truth. He had no idea.
A few weeks later, Quintanilla went to a party and saw one of his former classmates, freshly home from basic training and twenty pounds lighter, with bulging muscles and a newfound sense of confidence. He was telling jokes and hitting on girls. Maybe, Quintanilla said to his wife the next morning, he should consider the Marines. She didn’t like the idea, and neither did his mom, but Quintanilla couldn’t think of anything else to do. He sat down one night at the kitchen table, drew a line down the center of a piece of paper, wrote “Marine Corps” on the left side and tried to fill the right with other options. The only thing he could come up with was “Get promoted at the hobby store.”
Five months later, he arrived at the San Diego Marine Corps Recruit Depot in the middle of the night, shuffled into a room alongside eighty other young men, had his head shaved, his blood type tested, his clothes replaced with fatigues, and embarked on a new life.
The thirteen-week boot camp Quintanilla entered in 2010 was a relatively new experiment in the Corps’ 235-year-old quest to manufacture the perfect marine. For most of its history, the service’s training program had focused on molding rowdy teenagers into disciplined troops. But fifteen years before Quintanilla’s enlistment, a fifty-three-year-old general named Charles C. Krulak had been promoted to commandant, the Marines’ top position. Krulak believed basic training needed to change. “We were seeing much weaker applicants,” he told me. “A lot of these kids didn’t just need discipline, they needed a mental makeover. They’d never belonged to a sports team, they’d never had a real job, they’d never done anything. They didn’t even have the vocabulary for ambition. They’d followed instructions their whole life.”
This was a problem, because the Corps increasingly needed troops who could make independent decisions. Marines—as they will happily tell you—are different from soldiers and sailors. “We’re the first to arrive and the last to leave,” Krulak said. “We need extreme self-starters.” In today’s world, that means the Corps requires men and women capable of fighting in places such as Somalia and Baghdad, where rules and tactics change unpredictably and marines often have to decide—on their own and in real time—the best course of action.
“I began spending time with psychologists and psychiatrists, trying to figure out, how do we do a better job teaching these recruits to think for themselves?” Krulak said. “We had great recruits coming in, but they didn’t have any sense of direction or drive. All they knew was doing the bare minimum. It was like working with a bunch of wet socks. Marines can’t be wet socks.”
Krulak began reviewing studies on how to teach self-motivation, and became particularly intrigued by research, conducted by the Corps years earlier, showing that the most successful marines were those with a strong “internal locus of control”—a belief they could influence their destiny through the choices they made.
Locus of control has been a major topic of study within psychology since the 1950s. Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control tend to praise or blame themselves for success or failure, rather than assigning responsibility to things outside their influence. A student with a strong internal locus of control, for instance, will attribute good grades to hard work, rather than natural smarts. A salesman with an internal locus of control will blame a lost sale on his own lack of hustle, rather than bad fortune.
“Internal locus of control has been linked with academic success, higher self-motivation and social maturity, lower incidences of stress and depression, and longer life span,” a team of psychologists wrote in the journal Problems and Perspectives in Management in 2012. People with an internal locus of control tend to earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction.
In contrast, having an external locus of control—believing that your life is primarily influenced by events outside your control—“is correlated with higher levels of stress, [often] because an individual perceives the situation as beyond his or her coping abilities,” the team of psychologists wrote.
Studies show that someone’s locus of control can be influenced through training and feedback. One experiment conducted in 1998, for example, presented 128 fifth graders with a series of difficult puzzles. Afterward, each student was told they had scored very well. Half of them were also told, “You must have worked hard at these problems.” Telling fifth graders they have worked hard has been shown to activate their internal locus of control, because hard work is something we decide to do. Complimenting students for hard work reinforces their belief that they have control over themselves and their surroundings.
The other half of the students were also informed they had scored well, and then told, “You must be really smart at these problems.” Complimenting students on their intelligence activates an external locus of control. Most fifth graders don’t believe they can choose how smart they are. In general, young kids think that intelligence is an innate capacity, so telling young people they are smart reinforces their belief that success or failure is based on factors outside of their control.
Then all the students were invited to work on three more puzzles of varying difficulty.
The students who had been praised for their intelligence—who had been primed to think in terms of things they could not influence—were much more likely to focus on the easier puzzles during the second round of play, even though they had been complimented for being smart. They were less motivated to push themselves. They later said the experiment wasn’t much fun.
In contrast, students who had been praised for their hard work—who were encouraged to frame the experience in terms of self-determination—went to the hard puzzles. They worked longer and scored better. They later said they had a great time.
“Internal locus of control is a learned skill,” Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who helped conduct that study, told me. “Most of us learn it early in life. But some people’s sense of self-determination gets suppressed by how they grow up, or experiences they’ve had, and they forget how much influence they can have on their own lives.
“That’s when training is helpful, because if you put people in situations where they can practice feeling in control, where that internal locus of control is reawakened, then people can start building habits that make them feel like they’re in charge of their own lives—and the more they feel that way, the more they really are in control of themselves.”
For Krulak, studies like this seemed to hold the key to teaching recruits self-motivation. If he could redesign basic training to force trainees to take control of their own choices, that impulse might become more automatic, he hoped. “Today we call it teaching ‘a bias toward action,’ ” Krulak told me. “The idea is that once recruits have taken control of a few situations, they start to learn how good it feels.
“We never tell anyone they’re a natural-born leader. ‘Natural born’ means it’s outside your control,” Krulak said. “Instead, we teach them that leadership is learned, it’s the product of effort. We push recruits to experience that thrill of taking control, of feeling the rush of being in charge. Once we get them addicted to that, they’re hooked.”
For Quintanilla, this tutorial started as soon as he arrived. Initially, there were long days of forced marches, endless sit-ups and push-ups, and tedious rifle drills. Instructors screamed at him constantly. (“We’ve got an image to uphold,” Krulak told me.) But alongside those exercises, Quintanilla also confronted a steady stream of situations that forced him to make decisions and take control.
In his fourth week of training, for instance, Quintanilla’s platoon was told to clean the mess hall. The recruits had no idea how. They didn’t know where the cleaning supp
lies were located or how the industrial dishwasher worked. Lunch had just ended and they weren’t sure if they were supposed to wrap the leftovers or throw them away. Whenever someone approached a drill instructor for advice, all he received was a scowl. So the platoon began making choices. The potato salad got tossed, the leftover hamburgers went into the fridge, and the dishwasher was loaded with so much detergent that suds soon covered the floor. It took three and a half hours, including the time spent mopping up the bubbles, for the platoon to finish cleaning the mess hall. They mistakenly threw away edible food, accidentally turned off the ice cream freezer, and somehow managed to misplace two dozen forks. When they were done, however, their drill instructor approached the smallest, shyest member of the platoon and said he had noticed how the recruit had asserted himself when a decision was needed on where to put the ketchup. In truth, it was pretty obvious where the ketchup should have gone. There was a huge set of shelves containing nothing but ketchup bottles. But the shy recruit beamed as he was praised.
“I hand out a number of compliments, and all of them are designed to be unexpected,” said Sergeant Dennis Joy, a thoroughly intimidating drill instructor who showed me around the Recruit Depot one day. “You’ll never get rewarded for doing what’s easy for you. If you’re an athlete, I’ll never compliment you on a good run. Only the small guy gets congratulated for running fast. Only the shy guy gets recognized for stepping into a leadership role. We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.”
The centerpiece of Krulak’s redesigned basic training was the Crucible, a grueling three-day challenge at the end of boot camp. Quintanilla was terrified of the Crucible. He and his bunkmates whispered about it at night. There were rumors and wild conjectures. Someone said a recruit had lost a limb midway through the course the previous year. Quintanilla’s Crucible began on a Tuesday morning when his platoon was woken at two A.M. and told they should prepare themselves to march, crawl, and climb across fifty miles of obstacle courses. Each person carried thirty pounds of gear. They had only two meals apiece to last fifty-four hours. At most, they could hope for just a few hours of sleep. Injuries were expected. Anyone who stopped moving or lagged too far behind, they were told, would be dropped from the Corps.
Midway through the Crucible, the recruits encountered a task called Sergeant Timmerman’s Tank. “The enemy has chemically contaminated this area,” a drill instructor shouted, pointing to a pit the size of a football field. “You must cross it while wearing full gear and gas masks. If a recruit touches the ground, you have failed and must start over. If you spend longer than sixty minutes in the pit, you have failed and must start over. You must obey your team leader. I repeat: You may not proceed without a direct verbal order from the team leader. You must hear a command before you act, otherwise you have failed and must start over.”
Quintanilla’s team formed a circle and began using a technique they had learned in basic training.
“What’s our objective?” one recruit said.
“To cross the pit,” someone replied.
“How do we use the boards?” another recruit said, pointing to planks with ropes attached.
“We could lay them end to end,” someone answered. The team leader issued a verbal order and the circle broke up to test this idea along the border of the pit. They stood on one board while hauling the other forward. No one could keep their balance. The circle reformed. “How do we use the ropes?” a recruit asked.
“To lift the planks,” another said. He suggested standing on both boards simultaneously and using the ropes to lift each piece in tandem, as if on skis.
Everyone put on their gas masks and stood on the boards with the leader at the front. “Left!” he shouted as recruits pulled one of the planks slightly forward. “Right!” They began shuffling across the pit. After ten minutes, however, it was clear this wasn’t working. Some people were lifting too quickly, others were pushing the boards too far. And because they were all wearing gas masks, it was impossible to hear the leader’s commands. They had already gone too far to turn around—but at this rate, crossing would take hours. Recruits began yelling at each other to stop.
The leader ordered a pause. He turned to the man behind him. “Watch my shoulders,” he yelled through his gas mask. The leader shrugged his left shoulder, and then his right. By watching the rhythm of the leader, the recruit behind him could coordinate how to lift the boards. The only problem with this idea was that it violated one of the ground rules. Recruits had been told they could not act until they heard a verbal command from their team leader. But with their gas masks on, no one could really hear anything. However, there was no other way to proceed. So the team leader began shrugging and swinging his arms while screaming orders. No one caught on at first, so he began yelling one of the songs they had learned on long marches. The recruit behind him could make out enough of what he was singing to join in. His neighbor did the same. Eventually, they were all singing and shrugging and swinging in tandem. They crossed the field in twenty-eight minutes.
“Technically, we could send them back to start over because each person didn’t hear a direct verbal command from the team leader,” a drill sergeant later told me. “But that’s the point of the exercise: We know you can’t hear anything with the gas masks on. The only way to get across the pit is to figure out some workaround. We’re trying to teach them that you can’t just obey orders. You have to take control and figure things out for yourself.”
Twenty-four hours and another dozen obstacles later, Quintanilla’s platoon gathered at the base of the Crucible’s final challenge, a long, steep hill they called the Grim Reaper. “You don’t have to help each other during the Reaper,” Krulak said. “I’ve seen that happen before. Recruits fall down, and they don’t have buddies, so they get left behind.”
Quintanilla had been marching for two days by this point. He had slept less than four hours. His face was numb and his hands were covered with blisters and cuts from carrying water-filled drums across obstacles. “There were guys throwing up at the Reaper,” he told me. “One person had his arm in a sling.” As the group began walking up the mountain, recruits kept stumbling. They were all so exhausted they moved as if in slow motion, hardly making any progress. So they began linking up, arm in arm, to prevent one another from sliding down the incline.
“Why are you doing this?” Quintanilla’s pack buddy wheezed at him, lapsing into a call-and-response they had practiced on hikes. When things are at their most miserable, their drill instructors had said, they should ask each other questions that begin with “why.”
“To become a Marine and build a better life for my family,” Quintanilla said.
His wife had given birth a week earlier to a daughter, Zoey. He had been allowed to speak to her for a total of five minutes by telephone after the delivery. It was his only contact with the outside world in almost two months. If he finished the Crucible, he would see his wife and new child.
If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier, Quintanilla’s drill instructors had told him. That’s why they asked each other questions starting with “why.” Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.
The platoon summited the last peak as the sun crested, and staggered to a clearing with a flagpole. Everyone went still. They were finally done. The Crucible was over. A drill instructor walked through their formation, pausing before each man to place the service’s insignia, the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, in their hands. They were officially marines.
“You think boot camp is going to be all screaming and fighting,” Quintanilla told me. “But it’s not. It’s not like that at all. It’s more about learning how to make yourself do things you thought you couldn’t do. It’s really emotional, actually.”
Basic training, like the Marine Corps career itself, offers few material rewards. A Marine’s starting salary is $17,616 a year. However, the Corps has on
e of the highest career satisfaction rates. The training the Corps provides to roughly forty thousand recruits each year has transformed the lives of millions of people who, like Quintanilla, had no idea how to generate the motivation and self-direction needed to take control of their lives. Since Krulak’s reforms, the Corps’ retention of new recruits and the performance scores of new marines have both increased by more than 20 percent. Surveys indicate that the average recruit’s internal locus of control increases significantly during basic training. Delgado’s experiments were a start to understanding motivation. The Marines complement those insights by helping us understand how to teach drive to people who aren’t practiced in self-determination: If you give people an opportunity to feel a sense of control and let them practice making choices, they can learn to exert willpower. Once people know how to make self-directed choices into a habit, motivation becomes more automatic.
Moreover, to teach ourselves to self-motivate more easily, we need to learn to see our choices not just as expressions of control but also as affirmations of our values and goals. That’s the reason recruits ask each other “why”—because it shows them how to link small tasks to larger aspirations.
The significance of this insight can be seen in a series of studies conducted in nursing homes in the 1990s. Researchers were studying why some seniors thrived inside such facilities, while others experienced rapid physical and mental declines. A critical difference, the researchers determined, was that the seniors who flourished made choices that rebelled against the rigid schedules, set menus, and strict rules that the nursing homes tried to force upon them.
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