Dirty Chai with Chio - Ep 13 - Blind Loyalty is for Dogs not for you

The Dirty Thai Podcast discusses the book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck" by Mark Manson. The host shares stories from the book that highlight the importance of questioning blind loyalty and following orders. One story is about Lieutenant Onoda, a Japanese soldier who continued to fight in the jungle for almost 30 years after World War II ended because he didn't believe the war was over. The story became an urban legend and adventurer Norio Suzuki set out to find Onoda in 1972. Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Thai Podcast with me, Satyavati. My name is Satyavati, and welcome to the Dirty Thai Podcast with me, your host, Cheo, the podcast where we focus on holistic, personal, and professional success by growing and developing the common denominator to all your successes, all your failures, and everything in between, you. It's about the mindset, emotional regulation, and the intentional personal development that underpins holistic success. Today we're talking about a book I had a lot of difficulty reading because of its title. It's called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson. So as you might imagine, a book with a title like that would have a lot of swearing in it, and it does have a lot of swearing in it, which I also found a little bit off-putting. But that doesn't put me off a good idea when I hear one, and it certainly doesn't put me off a good story when I hear one. And reading some of the stories in this book that Mark Manson shared with us, I realized that blind loyalty is for dogs, not for people. And that is the title of this week's episode of the podcast. Blind loyalty is for dogs, not people. And I'm going to tell you two of the stories that really convinced me that this is indeed the case. And when Mark tells these stories, he's doing it in service of a great idea or a slightly different idea than the one that I got from it. And I got the one that he was giving, but I also got this, that we have to be mindful of why we are following orders, of why we are doing things. Otherwise, we get trapped in cycles that don't make sense in aid of an outcome that doesn't make sense, and in aid of a goal that means nothing to us in the end. And we have to balance the values of the people sending us with our values in order to actually truly achieve success. So the first story was one that I had never heard before. But when I asked a couple of people, they knew about it, but the great majority don't seem to. So this story is about a Lieutenant Onoda of the Japanese Imperial Army. And I hope you find this as fascinating as I did. So it's in Chapter 4 of the book. And it starts, in the closing months of 1944, after almost a decade of war, the tide was turning against Japan, as we all know from high school history. Their economy was floundering, their military overstretched across half of Asia, and the territories they had won throughout the Pacific were now toppling like dominoes to the U.S. forces. Defeat seemed inevitable. On December 26, 1944, the Second Lieutenant Hiro Onoda of the Japanese Imperial Army was deployed to the small island of Lubang in the Philippines. His orders were to slow the United States' progress as much as possible, to stand and fight at all costs, and to never, ever surrender. Both he and his commander knew that this was essentially a suicide mission. So in February 1945, the Americans arrived on Lubang and took the island with overwhelming force. Within days, almost all of the Japanese soldiers had either surrendered or been killed. But Onoda and his three men managed to hide in the jungle. From there, they began a guerrilla warfare campaign against the U.S. forces and the local population. They attacked supply lines, they shot at stray soldiers, they interfered with American forces in any way they could in line with their orders. That August, a mere half a year later, please pay attention to the timelines, a mere half a year later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered, and the deadliest war in human history came to its dramatic conclusion. But thousands of Japanese soldiers were still scattered amongst the Pacific Isles. Most, like Onoda, were hiding in the jungle. There was no Twitter, there was no social media, there were no cell phones, and so they did not know that the war was over. These holdouts continued to fight and to pillage as they had done before, because that was the reality they were living in. This was a real problem for the people trying to rebuild East Asia after the war, and governments agreed that something must be done. These people were a menace. The U.S. military, in conjunction with the Japanese government, dropped thousands of leaflets throughout the Pacific region, announcing that the war was over and it was time for everybody to go home. Onoda and his men, like many others, found and read these leaflets. But unlike most of the others, Onoda decided that they were fake, a trap set by the American forces to get the guerrilla fighters to show themselves. Ha! Onoda burned the leaflets, and he and his men stayed hidden and continued to fight. Five years went by. The leaflets stopped. Most of the American forces went home. The local population of Lubang attempted to return to their normal lives of farming and fishing. Yet there was Hiro Onoda and his merry men still shooting at farmers, burning their crops, stealing their livestock, murdering locals who wandered too far into the jungle. The Philippine government took to drawing up new flyers and spreading them across the jungle. Come out, they said. The war is over. You lost. I'm sorry to laugh. These two were ignored. In 1952, the Japanese government, 1952 guys, 1952, pay attention to the timelines, these people have been in the forest for years now. The war ended in 1945. In 1952, the Japanese government made one final effort to draw the last remaining soldiers out of hiding throughout the Pacific. This time, letters and pictures from missing soldiers' families were airdropped, along with a personal note from the emperor himself. Again, Onoda refused to believe that the information was real. Once again, he believed the airdrop was a trick by the Americans. Once again, he and his men stood and continued to fight in a war that had ended seven years before. Another few years went by, and the Philippine locals, sick of being terrorized, finally armed themselves and began fighting back. By 1959, 1959, we are counting the years in double digits now, one of Onoda's companions had surrendered, and another had been killed. Then a decade later, a decade after 1959, Onoda's last companion, a man called Kozuka, was killed in a shootout with the local police while he was burning rice fields, still waging a war against the local population a full quarter of a century after the end of World War II. Let's pause and let that sink in. They were still fighting a war that had been done, done, for a quarter of a century. Onoda, having now spent more than half his life in the jungle, was all by himself. In 1972, the news of Kozuka's death reached Japan and caused quite a stir. The Japanese people thought the last soldiers from the war had come home years earlier. They had no idea there were people in the jungle in the Philippines fighting for them still in a war that had long since ended. So if Kozuka had still been on Lubang until 1972, then maybe Onoda, the last known Japanese holdout from World War II, might still be alive. These are the Japanese people having this realization in 1972 over soldiers commanded to go and stand against the Americans in a war that ended in 1945. The people they were fighting for didn't even think they were there anymore. That year, both the Japanese and the Philippine governments sent search parties to look for this enigmatic second lieutenant, now a myth, part hero, part ghost, part legend. They found nothing. As the months progressed, though, the story of Lieutenant Onoda morphed into something of an urban legend, as it would, right? In Japan, the war hero who sounded too insane to actually exist, too insane to actually exist, many romanticized him, others criticized him, others thought he was the stuff of legend invented by those who still wanted to believe in a Japan that had long since died. It was around this time that a man called Norio Suzuki first heard of Onoda. This is such an interesting intersection of human story, of human lives. Suzuki was an adventurer, an explorer, a hippie, right? He was born after the war ended, so this man had been born after Onoda had been given instruction. He grew up, decided what he wanted to be, and then heard about Onoda. This is how long Onoda had been living in a jungle in the Philippines after the war ended. I cannot stress that enough. Where were we? Suzuki. Suzuki hears about this legend, this Onoda, and he thinks it might be fun to go and find this man, right? He had spent four years hitchhiking across Asia, across the Middle East, across Africa, sleeping on park benches, in strangers' cars, in jail cells. This man was a bum. He volunteered. I feel bad for saying that, but, you know, a spade a spades, right? He volunteered on farms for food, donated blood to pay for places to stay. He was a free spirit, they said, and a little bit nuts. Again, the man was a bum. In 1972, Suzuki decided he needed a new adventure, and what do you suppose that adventure was? That new adventure was that he was going to find Hiro Onoda. He was going to find the legend, and this suited him just perfectly because he had returned to Japan from his travels, turns out donating blood for money to pay for a place to sleep and sleeping in strangers' cars or in jail cells doesn't really earn you a living. He hated school. He couldn't hold down a job, and he really just wanted to be somewhere other than where he was. So he set off to look for Hiro Onoda. It was an interesting or a new novel adventure for him to pursue. He believed that he would be the one to find Onoda, right? So sure, search parties by multiple governments had not been able to find him, local police forces scavenging the jungle for almost 30 years, thousands of leaflets, but you know what? According to Mark Manson, eff it, this deadbeat college dropout hippie was going to be the one to find him. Unarmed, untrained for any sort of recon or tactical warfare, Suzuki traveled to Luang and began wandering around the jungle all by himself. His strategy was to yell Onoda's name really loudly and to tell him that the emperor was worried about him. Guess what, guys? Suzuki found Onoda in four days flat. How wild is that? Four days flat. Suzuki stayed with Onoda in the jungle for some time. Onoda had been alone by that point for over a year, and once found by Suzuki, he welcomed companionship and was desperate to learn what was happening in the outside world from someone he thought he could trust. So the two men became, you know, friends, trauma bonded if you ask me. Suzuki asked Onoda why he had stayed and continued to fight, and Onoda's answer was simple. He had been given the order to never surrender, so he stayed. For nearly 30 years, he had simply been following an order. Onoda then asked why a hippie boy like Suzuki was looking for him. Suzuki said he left Japan in search of three things, Lieutenant Onoda, a panda bear, and the abominable snowman in that order. The two men had been brought together under the most curious of circumstances, right? So what now? They were two people in a jungle, both imagining themselves heroes, despite both being alone with nothing, doing nothing, and adding value nowhere. Onoda had already by then given up most of his life to a phantom war. Suzuki would give up his too. Having found hero Onoda, he went on to find the panda bear, and he died a few years later in the Himalayas in search of the abominable snowman. It's tragic, isn't it? Humans, we choose to dedicate large portions of our lives to seemingly useless causes without ever questioning why we are doing things. When Simon Sinek says to you, start with why, it's because it is fundamental. It is fundamental to understand why you are doing something so that you have the ability to recognize when the why changes. There is the why informed by your personal values, and the why informed by the values of the people who have sent you, but you need to be present and alert and open-minded. We've spoken about this, to the possibility that circumstances change, that the information at your disposal changes, and when that information changes, you need to be able to pivot and make a different decision. The businesses that didn't pivot in the face of COVID didn't make it. The people who didn't pivot in the face of COVID probably didn't make it either, and I'm not talking about the people that got sick, that's different. I'm speaking here of the people who did not understand the lessons that COVID came to teach us. Later on, Hiro Onoda would return to Japan, the hero that he imagined himself to be, they treated him as such, but he found that Japan had moved on. Japan had become modern. Japan had moved on from this hatred of all things Western. He found that women dressed differently, the food was different, in his mind, and this is how he described it, the country that he had been in the bush fighting for had turned into a vacuous nation full of hippies and loose women in Western clothes, and he was confronted with an unavoidable truth, that all his fighting had meant nothing. After all of that, it turns out that he had been happiest in the jungle fighting his imaginary war for a Japan that was also imaginary, and never questioning anything. The realization, the weight of the realization of all of this was so much for him that he packed up and moved to Brazil in 1980, where he remained until he died. What a story! I read this and I thought, thank you Mark Manson, thank you for sharing this story because wow, Simon Sinek already tried to tell us to start with why, and we might not have understood it in the way that this story particularly tells you to understand it. Mark Manson, this is a book, right? So what I've told you is a story on about four pages of an entire book, so it's worthwhile to read the whole book if you're not deeply offended by swear words. If you are focused purely on the substance, this is a good book for you. It's also interesting to note that although the book sounds like it talks about not giving an F according to the title, what it is actually is about giving an F for the right things. It's about being intentional with the F that you give. So I think that's important for me to point out. It's not a book about how everything is screwed and done and will never work. It's not about that. It's a book about applying your energy meaningfully to the things that you truly give an F about. It's interesting, so that approach would also explain why his subsequent book is called Everything is F'd, a book about hope. It really is a counterintuitive approach to this self-help dialogue. Now when he finishes telling us about the Onoda story, he goes on to talk about how self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you are going to start crying at inappropriate times, which I thought was quite funny. But in the end, it really is about understanding that you have blind spots, understanding that you need to ask why you feel certain emotions. It's also about asking yourself why you consider something a success or a failure. Let things not be determined purely by what other people value. Ask yourself if the things that you have done are a success or a failure by your standards. A lot of us don't like doing this work because this work hurts, this work sucks, and like he said, it's an onion, and the more you peel it, the more tears you're going to cry. I can tell you from personal experience, I have cried a lot of tears in pursuit of the core of this onion. I'm still crying them every so often, but they have been the most worthwhile tears that I have cried over the years, because if you don't cry those particular tears, the tears of not knowing will still come, and they will last forever, because you haven't done the work that will bring them to an end. Both roads are difficult. You just choose your heart. Then I'm going to tell you the second story. The second story is self-explanatory, but I think it's very important for it to be heard and to be told, and I will try and do it in a very short space of time. It's also in the same chapter, and it's called Rockstar Problems. That's the title he gave it. In 1983, a young guitarist was kicked out of his band in the worst possible way, and this is in Hollywood, so this is a big deal. The band had just been signed to a record deal, and they were about to record their first album, and a couple of days before the recording began, they showed the guitarist the door. No warning, no discussion, no dramatic blowout. They literally just woke up and said to him, go home. This is not for you. As he sat on the bus back to Los Angeles from New York – oh, so they were in New York, not in Hollywood – on the bus back to LA, he kept saying to himself, how did this happen? What did I do wrong? What will I do now? Record contracts didn't exactly fall out of the sky, especially for metal bands. Had he missed his one and only shot, I can imagine the stress that he was going through. By the time the bus got to LA, it was a long ride. The guitarist had gotten over his self-pity, and he had vowed to start a new band. He decided that his new band would be so successful that his old band would forever regret their decision. I'm going to show them. We've heard that one many times, haven't we? He would become so famous that they would be subjected to decades of seeing him on TV, hearing him on the radio, seeing posters of him in the streets, and pictures of him in magazines. They would be flipping burgers somewhere, loading vans from their shitty club gigs – that's his swear words, not mine – fat and drunk with their ugly wives, and he would be rocking out in front of a stadium, live on television, and he would bathe in the tears of his betrayers, each tear wiped dry by a crisp, clean, hundred dollar bill. And so the guitarist worked as if he was possessed by a musical demon, so he spent months recruiting the best musicians he could find, far better musicians than his previous bandmates in his mind. He wrote dozens of songs. He practiced religiously. His seething anger fueled his ambition. We all know someone like this. Revenge became his muse. Within a couple of years, his new band had signed a record deal of their own, and a year after that, their first record would go gold. This is amazing, right? He is achieving incredible success, especially for someone who is taking a second bite at the cherry. That guitarist's name was Dev Mustaine, and the new band he formed was the legendary heavy metal band Megadeth. Megadeth would go on to sell over 25 million albums and tour the world many times over. That is amazing. And today, he is considered one of the most brilliant and influential musicians in the history of heavy metal music. Unfortunately for the story that he told himself, the band that he was kicked out of was Metallica, and they sold 180 million albums worldwide. Metallica is considered by many to be one of the greatest rock bands of all time. And because of this, in a rare intimate interview in 2003, a tearful David, Dave, admitted that he couldn't help but still feel that he was a failure, despite all that he had accomplished, because he would always be the guy who got kicked out of Metallica. What? What? What? And Mark Manson says it nicely, aptly, we are apes. We think we are all sophisticated, with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but we are just a bunch of finely ornamented apes. And because we are apes, we instinctually measure ourselves against others and vie for status. The question is not whether we evaluate against others, but rather the question is, by what standard do we measure ourselves? Dave, whether he realized it or not, chose to measure himself by whether or not he was more successful and popular than Metallica. The experience and trauma of getting kicked out of the band made success for him only success relative to what Metallica did. Despite taking a horrible event in his life and making something positive out of it, his choice to hold on to Metallica's success as his life-defining metric continued to hurt him and drive him for decades. Despite the money, the fame, the accolades, and even the millions of fans that he had, he, in his mind, was still a failure. We might look at him and think, what? How? How can you even think that? But that's because you are applying different values, right? But ask yourself, ask yourself, if I don't want to work a job for a boss I hate, I would like to earn enough money to send my kids to a good school, or I would be happy to not wake up in a drainage ditch, ask yourself if any of these metrics are truly yours and whether they are any better than the ones that Dave applied. Our values determine what we call success. Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everybody else. Onoda's value of loyalty to the Japanese empire is what sustained him on Lubang for 30 years, but this same value is also what made him miserable when he returned to Japan. Dave's metric of being better than Metallica likely is the reason why he went on to have an incredibly successful music career. It is also the reason why he never considered himself successful. There are other musicians, there's one who was kicked out of the Beatles and he then went on to have a beautiful marriage with a wonderful woman and live a very middle class life and it's the best thing that ever happened to him according to him. He was successful. So to quote Mark Manson, and please forgive me for swearing because this is coming straight out of the book, let me not say it in the words that he says, let me say it on my own. To the extent that you are applying a poor set of values, you will achieve a poor set of results. To the extent you are not questioning, you will achieve a poor set of results. To the extent that you are not present and paying attention to new information that might change your view, you might fight a war that has ended for 30 more years. Be present, pay attention, ask why, be open to new information, allow yourself to evolve and to grow and to learn, peel back the onion, face the pain of learning who you are. That at least prevents pain in the long term but the comfort of not doing that in the short term guarantees you pain for 30 years, guarantees that you will run around in a jungle killing people long after a war is over, guarantees that you will climb up a mountain looking for the abominable snowman and die there because you haven't understood that you have achieved what three governments and multiple search parties failed to do over the course of 30 years in four days. Failing to understand these things will have you thinking you're a failure when you're indeed a success and if in your mind you're a failure, no amount of convincing from outside can convince you that you're a success. I hope, I hope, I hope that these stories have done something for you in the way that they did something for me and I hope that when you go out this week to execute which is always the goal, you remember why you're doing it, you check your values, you know who you are and you stand in the truth of who you are alongside people with values that align with yours or alongside people who you know you're going to leave because they don't have values that align with yours. Have a beautiful week and if you like the podcast, please like, subscribe, share. I love receiving your DMs, I love receiving your comments, I love receiving your emails. I appreciate every single one of them. Thank you for listening to the podcast. If this changes one person's life or changes one person's ability to think and view the world, then my goal in this verse is achieved. Thank you so much.