The title of this book comes from one of the most practical and actionable pieces of advice McRaven offers his readers: starting the day with one consistent, small success—for example, making the bed. For McRaven, the experience of having to begin each day of SEAL training by doing a concrete thing well, with care, and without the expectation of praise offered him the chance to feel control over an environment that was otherwise designed to break down and dismiss his sense of dignity and self-worth. Making the bed was a positive achievement, something that could “give you solace, that can motivate you to begin your day, that can be a sense of pride in an oftentimes ugly world” (13). Possibly, this deep association between bed-making and self-respect is why McRaven makes so much out of deposed tyrant Saddam Hussein’s unwillingness to neaten his prison sheets.

McRaven describes SEAL training as a constant assault on the trainee’s self-esteem. Instructors psychologically manipulated recruits in a variety of ways—playing on their unfounded fears of sharks, berating them for being short, arbitrarily declaring them to having broken a rule and invoking the “sugar cookie” punishment of being covered in sand.