On Extreme Ownership
The Beautiful Life | Issue #114
Hello Champ,
Before we get into what I actually want to talk about, let me say something that I think needs to be established clearly, because everything else I am going to say rests on it.
First, a Word About Coaching
If you are going to pursue any serious goal, any goal that is genuinely large, the kind that requires you to do things differently from everyone else, you cannot be equipped like everyone else. You must be open and willing to be stretched beyond the limits you currently know. That is not optional. That is the starting condition.
And part of that stretching is coaching.
Messi is still being coached today. Not when he was starting out, not when he was trying to prove himself. Today. Right now. At the absolute peak of his game, having broken records that most people cannot even name. There is still a coach on the training ground every single time he practises, coaching him specifically on different aspects of his game. He has not said “I have outgrown coaching. I know the techniques. I can coach the coach.” No. He submits.
And then look at Arsenal this season. They became known as the set-piece kings, meaning they score from corner kicks, throw-ins, free kicks, dead-ball situations. Do you know how that happened? They got a coach whose only job was to help them get better at set pieces. Not the head coach. A coach for that one aspect of the game. How do you position in the opposition’s 18-yard box during a corner? How do you run the free kick? They did not leave that portion of their game to chance. They deliberately coached it. And they scored so many goals from set pieces that eventually every other team started scrambling to figure out how to defend against them.
Coaching is priceless. Even the best are coached.
I personally am at the point where I need to speak with my mentor to get recommendations for executive coaching. Yes. Me. Because I feel there are new spaces I am coming into that require coaching I have not yet received. Something as simple as a handshake. Did you know there are different types of handshakes? The basic rule is that your grip must be firm. But beyond that, there is coaching around how long a handshake should last, like you actually have a timer in your head that says, okay, fifteen seconds, and then you release. There is coaching around mirroring the posture of the person you are speaking with. If they lean forward, you lean forward. These little things that you could swear make no difference, they actually do make a difference. And a coach surfaces them.
And that is the point I want to make: the capacity to recognize that tiny improvements, done consistently, compound into outstanding results, that is one of the best things that can ever happen to someone on a trajectory toward success, whether in career or in life.
I do this for myself too. After every time I speak, I do mental reviews. I rarely listen to recordings of myself. I find it genuinely awkward. But I force myself to once in a while. And what I am looking for is: where were the gaps? Did I jump from one concept to another without building a proper transition? It is a self-learning process, and you do get better and better. But that level of self-coaching is not as brutal as actually having a coach for speeches. If you get someone to coach you in speeches specifically, you will see outsized results in a short period of time. Because that person is dispassionate. They are neutral. They have no sentiment attached. They will say: your posture was wrong. The way you walked to the podium was wrong. And then they tell you exactly what to do. And it works.
The Problem We Are Actually Solving
Let me tell you about distraction, because this is essential.
Until you know what distraction is robbing you of, you will not be angry at it. That is the truth. You need ways of measuring your life, of placing seasons of your life side by side and comparing what is actually happening.
Distraction in our generation is very real. And sometimes the distraction is not even a bad thing. You can be distracted by good things. But if it is not moving you toward the goals you are meant to pursue, it is still distraction.
The deeper problem for us as a generation is that we have very smart people operating at a shallow level. And one of the advantages people who lived centuries ago had was that they did not have this constant buzz of information around them. Books were expensive then. A personal library might have all of just twenty books. And so you read those twenty books again and again for forty years of your life. You gained mastery. It was not shallow browsing. It was deep reading: underlining, bringing out your own thoughts, engaging the text.
There was no radio in the early centuries. When radio came, at least it still made you work, because you had to imagine what you were hearing. Your mind was being exercised. Then video came and began doing the work for you. Television did almost all the imagining for you. And now we have social media. Someone writes a genuinely intelligent post and people comment: “This is too long. Can you summarize for us?”
Books are one of the last “saviours” of civilization. I will say it that way. Books force you to pay attention. They force you to encounter new words and go find their meanings. They build your imagination. Because here is the thing: you think in words. Your imagination is built on words. The richer your vocabulary, the richer your imagination. The more limited your words, the narrower your inner world. And that is not the only reason to read, but it is a real one.
The result of all of this is that we have smart people with shallow focus. And we cannot afford that. Not with the kind of goals we have.
What Is Ownership?
Let me make this distinction very clearly, because it is the heart of everything.
A task can be assigned to you. But you might not take ownership of it. And that gap, between what is assigned and what is owned, is where everything either flourishes or collapses.
Think about it practically. Your boss says, “Please, go and close the door.” You go, you close it, it opens slightly, you walk back to your seat and report, “I have closed it.” That is delegated responsibility. You did the task.
But the person who has psychological ownership of that task goes to close the door, feels it push back open, does not walk away. They push it again. It opens again. They are not done. They look closely and discover that there is dried cement at the top of the frame that is preventing it from fully shutting. They scrape the cement away. They close the door. They confirm it holds. Then they return to their seat. That is ownership. Same instruction. Completely different results.
Ownership is a state in which individuals feel as though what they are responsible for is theirs. Not just delegated to them. Not just assigned. Theirs.
And you can see this in how our infrastructure breaks down in Nigeria. The reason the roads are the way they are is because the people who built them never took ownership. They never asked themselves: what if my own child has to pass through this road every day on the way to school? Will it be safe for her? When you ask that question and mean it, the road you build will be a different road. It goes from being a contract to being something you have internalized as yours.
Or look at housing. The buildings people call luxury today — you know the ones: narrow windows, astroturf on stone slabs, small rooms presented as premium. The idea is to get it built, use nice paint, and sell it to the next person as fast as possible. No ownership. I once stayed at an Airbnb in Lekki where the water smelled. But I had no option. The reason the water was not treated is because the owner is not the one living there. Ordinarily, Lekki has water issues. Many sinks are stained brown. But if you are going to collect money from people, at minimum treat the water — water treatment removes both the smell and the colour. But they do not care, because it is not their home. That is not ownership.
Now. Ownership shows up in three specific ways.
How Ownership Manifests
Care for Quality
Let me show you something that changed how I think about quality.
There is a company called Saddleback Leather. They make shoes, bags, belts, wallets. Their warranty is 100 years. One hundred years. Their slogan: “They’ll fight over it when you are dead.” In fact, they went further — they said your children will fight over it before you are dead.
Their website says: No breakable parts. Over-engineered. Tornado-proof. That is what extreme ownership does to quality. When you own something, you become the first person to stress test it. You put it under different tests to see whether it will break. You find the weaknesses before the market does. And that is exactly what the Western world does systematically. How do they know if a wristwatch is waterproof? They submerge it and increase the depth gradually until it stops working. Then they do it again. And again. Until they know exactly at what depth it will hold, and they design to that.
Proactive Problem Solving
The book this topic comes from, Extreme Ownership, was written by a former US Navy Seal. I love reading about the Navy Seals. They are elite people who go through the most rigorous preparation available, and then they become a different category of humans.
Their training is extreme by design. There is a 6-kilometre race in boots, carrying a 50-kilogram bag. That is a cement bag on your back while you are also holding your rifle and running through different terrains. There was one guy in one of those races who, when he finally removed his boots at the end, the soles of his feet peeled off with them. The skin had detached from the feet and was left inside the boots. That is the level.
But the reason the training is that extreme is because what they will face in the field is even more extreme and there, you cannot control the variables. Imagine going into Nigeria expecting electricity, and then power goes out the moment you arrive. So they train to dismantle their weapons blindfolded. Every single part, without looking, and then reassemble them. Because the field is unpredictable.
There was a mission, a real one that was later made into a film, where the team was exiting the theater of operations and an enemy threw a grenade. There was situational awareness across all of them. Everyone saw it. Everyone saw what it meant. One Seal, in that instant, made a calculation: if this goes off, everyone dies. He dived onto the grenade. He told the others to run. The bomb detonated and he contained it with his body. He died. But his team made it out.
That is proactive problem-solving at its most extreme—not waiting to be told whose responsibility it is, not looking around for someone else to act. Seeing the problem and moving.
You cannot delegate yourself out of ownership. You either have it or you don’t.
Responsibility Without Being Chased
Imagine a dignitary arriving at an event and the protocol officer has stepped away for a moment. You are nearby. You see it. The dignitary is standing there. And what happens is — you look around, you think, “Blessing will handle it. The coordinator will sort it out.” So you sit there watching what is becoming an awkward situation. A crisis is already blooming.
The person with ownership does not wait. They walk over: “Sir, welcome. Your protocol officer has just stepped away for a moment. They will join you shortly. But in the meantime, allow me to show you to your seat.” And the situation is resolved.
You do not need to be assigned. You do not need to be told. You see the gap. You fill it.
This is also the distinction between ownership and responsibility as frameworks:
Responsibility is assigned. Ownership is chosen.
Responsibility is task-focused. If your task is to mop the floor, you mop and tick it off. But there are streaks on the floor from a mop that was not properly rinsed. You mopped. But the room is not clean. An owner does not ask, “Have I mopped?” An owner asks, “Is it clean?”
And ownership-focus does something else: it makes you lift your eyes. You were sent to mop, but when you lift your eyes you see a cobweb in the corner. You were not asked about cobwebs. Nobody will punish you for leaving it. But the person who owns the outcome, the clean environment, takes down the cobweb. Nobody told them to. Nobody will question them for not doing it. It simply needed to be done.
Responsibility is reactive. You wait for instructions. Ownership is proactive. You anticipate.
Responsibility produces short-term fixes. The bathroom is not clean and you know it, so you close the door tightly so the smell does not escape. In the short term, it might feel like something was handled. But after a while, the smell comes through anyway. That is not a solution, it is a delay.
Responsibility is identity-neutral. Ownership is identity. You choose it. You say: this is who I am.” This thing is mine. I am the one who is best placed to make this happen. And that changes everything about how you show up.
The Framework: Four Levels of Team Members
I want to share something I shared with my own team recently: a framework around the four levels of team members, because it maps very directly to what we are talking about.
Level One: They do nothing until a task is assigned. The task is given, they do it, they wait for feedback, and they do not follow up. If no task is given, nothing happens.
Level Two: They notice a problem and report it. “Sir, I discovered that our signage is faded.” That is actually good. At minimum, they said something.
Level Three: They notice a problem, identify options, and bring them for a decision. “Sir, our signage is faded. I have spoken to three different printers. Here are the prices. This one delivers in 24 hours, this one in 8. Which should we go with?”
Level Four: They notice a problem, identify solutions, evaluate them in the context of what they know about the company and leadership, and execute the best one; then report back. “Sir, our signage was faded. I contacted three printers, found that this one offers a two-year warranty on the banner, determined that the cost was within the range where I did not need authorization, paid for it out of my pocket because we cannot afford people to keep missing their way, and had it done overnight. Here is the receipt.”
What do you do with a person like that? You elevate them. People around them might say it is favoritism. It is not. It is recognition. Because this person has done something the others did not: they owned it. They did not wait. They solved it. And they are already signing their own promotion letter with how they work.
Ideally, every team member should be working toward level four.
Why Ownership Works
There are several things that ownership produces that responsibility alone cannot.
Higher commitment and persistence. Where there is no ownership, you give up too easily. Someone recently told me about a project they were working on where they concluded a particular thing was not possible. I asked how they knew. They said they had been texting people, asking if it was feasible, and people were telling them no.
I was flustered. I told them: You are in your room, texting people, expecting them to prioritize your question, and you are taking their casual responses as a verdict? You are not their priority. Why would they give you their real energy through a text? If you had traveled, gone to where they are, sat with them, said “Follow me, let’s find out together,” and then they told you it was not possible, I would accept that. But you are in your room, two people have said no over text, and you are telling me it is not possible?
Ownership brings persistence. The person who owns the problem keeps trying alternatives. Let’s try this angle. Let’s try that angle. That is how you see someone sit with a bug for fifteen hours without giving up, because they have internalized: this bug will not beat me. I will see its end before it sees mine.
Better discretionary effort. Discretion is the ability to make informed decisions within your lane based on what you know about your leaders, your organization, and the situation without overstepping. Here is an example: your direct supervisor is unreachable, and a client needs an answer. The person with no ownership says, “Sorry, my boss is not available. I cannot give you an answer.” The client loses confidence. The deal may evaporate.
The person with ownership thinks: I have listened to my boss. I know how they think. What would they most likely do here? And then they say to the client: “We have three options to consider. The timeline would be somewhere between three to five weeks, depending on what you want to see. Budget would range from 30 to 70 million depending on features. And we can do it in-person, remotely, or a hybrid of both. We will circle back to you with the final specifics.” What that person has done is kept every door open. When they brief their boss, the boss can confirm the specifics. The deal is still alive, the relationship is intact, and the team member showed judgment.
Stronger team trust. When someone steps in to fill a gap, the person whose gap it was has a choice: feel threatened, or feel grateful. If the protocol officer steps away and a colleague handles the arriving dignitary, the protocol officer who lacks trust will feel: why didn’t they come and find me? Why are they taking my shine? Not recognizing that actually, the old blame would have fallen on them if the guest was left standing there alone.
The person who has built trust in the team will feel: thank God someone covered me. And the team keeps moving.
Trust also flows from leadership downward. Leadership has to create a safe space for mistakes that come from initiative. When my son Amos knocked a saucer off the table recently, the first thing we said was: “Stay there. Don’t move. Are you okay?” Because a broken saucer can be replaced. What I am not willing to break is his confidence. In a home where the flat-screen TV took two years’ savings to buy, the child who accidentally pulls it off the wall will be beaten. That fear of getting things wrong will follow them into adulthood. But in a home where the first question is “Are you hurt?”, something very different is being built.
Leadership must do the same. If someone takes a discretionary step that turns out to be wrong, the response cannot be punishment. It must be learning. Because the moment you punish initiative, you kill initiative. And you will never get ownership from people who are afraid to move without permission.
Increasing the Surface Area of Luck
I want to say one thing about what extreme ownership does over time, because I think it is often misunderstood.
People who take extreme ownership consistently increase the surface area of luck for their lives.
People around them call it luck. It is not luck. It is opportunity meeting preparation. They show up consistently. They demonstrate capacity. They build trust over time. And so when high-stakes things arise, they are the ones who get sent.
I was invited to Aso Rock for an event. I could not make it. I sent Funto. Why could I trust her to walk into Aso Rock and represent the Lab? Because she has taken extreme ownership on enough occasions that I know she can answer any question about what we do even without me there. And at that event, she had a conversation with a woman who has deployed over six billion dollars in capital. That woman said, “I need to come and see what you are doing.”
That conversation did not happen because of luck. It happened because of consistent, unrewarded, unspoken extreme ownership over time, which built the depth and capability to have that conversation and make it mean something.
From Ownership to Deep Work
Once a person begins to truly own something, something else becomes necessary: the capacity to do that work deeply. Ownership answers who is responsible. Deep work answers how we do it well.
You can own an outcome but still be too distracted to actually produce it at the level it deserves. That is the next problem to solve, and it is the other half of this conversation.
But I want to sit here for a moment before we move.
People who show extreme ownership; the ones who prayed without anyone asking, the ones who rearranged the chairs, the ones who stayed late with junior colleagues until they found their footing, the ones who edited reels of leadership content because they believed more people should hear it; those people feel like nobody is watching.
People are watching.
And more than that: the compound effect of those decisions, made consistently over time, is building something in them that no one can take away. Not even when they transition to new seasons. Not ever.
That is what extreme ownership is for.
I invite you to embrace this invitation. You won’t regret it.
Till next time,
JD
Curated Gems
Every issue of this newsletter comes with a curated list of essays, videos, and/or audio that will help you dive deeper into The Beautiful Life. Enjoy these picks for today's issue!
On Place, Patience & Community
In this video, I name three plagues quietly shaping modern life in overlooked places: the plague of placelessness, the tyranny of short-term thinking, and the plague of isolation. I argue that these forces erode commitment, weaken vision, and make meaningful collective progress harder to sustain.
Drawing from years of building patiently in Ogbomoso, I offer three corresponding antidotes: place, patience, and community. Watch here.
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic (2008)
The essay that started a generation’s reckoning with what the internet is doing to our minds. Carr opens with one of the most honest paragraphs in modern writing: “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore.” He wrote this in 2008, and the diagnosis has only deepened since. Read it in full. It is not long. Read here.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/
The Mind’s Architecture
The world people experience externally often flows from an internal world they’ve never learned to examine.Earlier today in the LeadWithJD session, I explored the characteristics, textures, and possibilities of a beautiful mind. Go listen to the recording and share your thoughts with me. Replay: t.me/leadiithjd
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