Made with Others

The people pushing individual discipline the hardest built that discipline inside something special: a powerful formative unit.

Jocko Willink built his inside SEAL Team Three, Task Unit Bruiser. David Goggins built his inside BUD/S.

To be fair to Willink — he knows this. His actual business is organizational culture; he sells unit cohesion to corporations, and Extreme Ownership is explicitly a book about how leaders serve teams. If you pushed him on what follows, he probably wouldn’t disagree with much of it.

**But the Jocko consumer brand sells something different. **The podcast, the 4:30 AM watch post, the morning routine content: *wake up early, do hard things, embrace the suck. Alone. With your phone as your accountability partner.

He pushes the individual part, stripped of the container that produced it.

This is a pattern, not an accident specific to those two men.

Every system that reliably transforms people does so by forging cohesive social units

The military puts you in a platoon. You train together, suffer together, eat and sleep on the same schedule. The structure isn’t optional. The other people aren’t optional. Peer-reviewed research following 4,645 soldiers through deployment found that unit cohesion independently predicts psychological outcomes after combat — independent of what soldiers experienced in the field. Same exposure, different unit, different men came home. The container shapes the result.

Monastic orders across traditions operate on identical logic. You don’t become a monk by reading about it. You show up, follow a rule, sit in silence with others at 4 AM not because you feel like it, but because that’s what everyone does, and if you don’t show up, someone comes looking for you.

Martial arts. Trade apprenticeships. AA. Team sports. Every one of them: a room, a shared standard, commitment visible to others, people who notice whether you showed up.

One of the best-designed studies on addiction recovery — a 2020 Cochrane Review examining 27 studies covering 10,565 participants — compared AA directly against CBT and motivational enhancement therapy, the best clinical treatments available. AA matched or beat professional treatment on every measure. On sustained sobriety at one year: 42% for AA, 35% for clinical alternatives. The content was roughly equivalent. The community was not.

The identity formation, cohesion, and accountability of the room won.

Consider: what is the single question most strongly linked to high performing teams in the workplace?

*It’s unexpected: do you have a close friend at work?

Gallup’s workplace research — tens of millions of survey responses across industries and decades — found that this single question was the single strongly-linked variable — not compensation or management structure.

*Think about that for your company: do you have a close friend at work?

Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 internal teams and arrived at the same conclusion from a different angle: the strongest predictor of team effectiveness wasn’t individual talent. It was whether people felt safe being vulnerable with each other. Teams with that quality outperformed teams staffed with smarter individuals who didn’t trust each other.

Group relationship precedes performance. Every time, across every domain we’ve studied.

Group-based programs designed with deliberate cohesion — true groups where members are accountable to each other — outperform standard group classes, which outperform solo programs.

The completion rate for self-guided digital health programs sits consistently in the single digits. The content in those programs is often sound, but without other people watching, almost everyone stops.

Weight loss: participants in group-based interventions were 36% more likely to hit clinically meaningful targets than participants completing identical programs individually. Same content, different container.

On mortality: a meta-analysis aggregating 148 studies and over 300,000 participants found that social isolation carries the same mortality risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. The Harvard Study of Adult Development — 85 years of data on the same families — found that relationship quality at age 50 predicts physical health at age 80 better than cholesterol, blood pressure, or genetics.

*This finding has the evidentiary weight of the research on smoking.

The infrastructure that once made belonging automatic is gone.

Civic associations, unions, fraternal orders, churches — all contracted dramatically over the past 60 years, a decline Robert Putnam documented exhaustively and that has continued since.

In 1990, 3% of Americans reported having no close friends. By 2024, 17%. For working-age adults without college degrees, 24% — one in four.

By middle age, Americans spend roughly 30 minutes a day with friends, down from over two hours at age 18. The structure of modern life — commutes, shift work, dual-income households, screens — systematically eliminates the time that belonging requires.

Content replaced institutions.

Podcasts. Apps. The self-improvement industry makes billions selling individual solutions to a structurally collective problem. The completion rate tells you everything about how that model performs.

The research points to three mechanisms through which groups produce better outcomes:

1. Accountability — visible commitment increases follow-through
2. Community identity — changing inside a group makes the change part of who you are
3. Cohesion — shared physical experience creates the mutual dependence the brain actually runs on

An app can provide the first. A well-designed cohort can provide the first and second.

A physical community built around shared challenge can provide all three simultaneously — and interventions that do so outperform those that provide only one or two.

I’ll publish the full evidence base here in coming days, for anyone who wants to go deep.

The answer isn’t better content.

It’s a room, a standard, and other people who give a damn whether you show up.

*Start with the person next to you.