David Goggins on Fear

When you're afraid of something, you have to master it. That's how you start to overcome it. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. What we do is we shackle our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind that this is all I can do. I was a weak mind, you know, a weak-minded person, so I mastered my mind. And in mastering my mind, I mastered the human mind.

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He's David Goggins, and here's my take on his Top 10 Rules of Success, Volume 7.

Enjoy.

Okay, let's kick it off with rule number 1: be open-minded.

I never thought in my wildest dreams I could be a Navy SEAL. It's until you opened your mind— open-mindedness creates that. We all shut down our mind. Like, for instance, when I broke the pull-up record, everybody around me who heard the pull-up record was 4,020 pull-ups, that's the first thing they did. Oh my God, 4,000 in 24 hours?

Or was it—

yeah, it's 4,020 pull-ups in 24-hour period. Yeah. The first thing I did versus closing my mind, you're like, oh my God, that's crazy. I went and got a pen and say, how many is that every minute? Exactly. Every hour, every second. Yeah. Instead of taking life and making it out to be this grandiose thing, start breaking it down. Start breaking it down. And most of us, we live in a box and we don't want to go outside that box at all, ever. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. What we do is we shackle our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind that this is all I can do. This is all I'm good at. And we, we, we take away the possibilities of you could be this, you could be that. Yeah. You could be all these things. And I never thought at 300 pounds I could be Navy SEAL. Wow. So if my mind was shackled, me and you would never meet. There'd be no book, right? There'd be no book, right? There'd be nothing. So what people understand is that they live for themselves, not knowing that you have the power within yourself to change millions of lives. Yeah. By facing life.

Rule number 2, enjoy the moment.

The reason why we go back to old habits is because our goals are too lofty. We're not achieving our goals fast enough. So what happens is, you know what, man, we're very impatient nowadays. For me, it was good. I didn't have a phone. I was, I was, I was out of this world by myself. It was a race against David Goggins. It wasn't a race against God. I'm gonna look good for this person or that person. It was me. I got to change myself. So for me, if I lost 5 pounds in a week, I got a feeling. I allowed myself to feel proud of that. I didn't look at, I gotta lose 106 pounds. I'm like, man, I went from 297, now I'm 292 in one week, man. I'm killing it. We don't— we're not proud of ourselves for the small accomplishments. What we need is we need this monstrosity of a thing to happen and say, ah, I did it. No, there's a process that you have to go through, and patience is the process. And if you don't have patience, after a week, I haven't lost 30 pounds, man, I'm done. I'm over it. So that's what I found out with people, man. They're not patient enough to realize and to enjoy the moment, not live in it, just enjoy it. There's no finish line in life, but enjoy that moment. Roger that, man. I lost 5. Let me go 10 next week. So that's the whole thing about it. That's how people lose it.

Rule number 3, change your mentality.

You get the opportunity to become a Navy SEAL and then you end up going through BUD/S 3 times. It's like, yeah, Merry Christmas. I got lucky, man. I was very fortunate to go through 3 times and not in a sadistic way, in a life-changing, growing way. I found out so much about myself through going through that training 3 times and I went through the hardest part of the training 3 times, you know, after the first— so, so first phase is the crucible, man. And that's where I was at for 3 times. I spent most of my time in BUD/S in first phase, in the Hell Week, in the Hell Weeks, and being in that grind. And in that grind, I got time to examine myself. I caught the live autopsy and also examined other people because I was really good about putting people way above me. 'Cause I was, I wasn't shit. I was never nobody. So for me to be on the same stage as these great wannabe Navy SEALs and bus trainers, like, my God, you guys are amazing. I actually got here with you all. Thank you so much for allowing me in to play. But as I was there for so long, I got a really good chance to sit back. 'Cause now the cold water is just water now. It's no longer cold anymore. Your mind starts to change. They say, get in the water. Most people think about it. For you, it became my life. So I started learning that if you start to change your mindset versus it being like, oh my God, this sucks. I became a professional BUD/S student, so I wasn't going to leave until I graduated. So I started realizing if this is my home, this is what I am. I had to always reset the bar. I had to reset my new norm. There always had to be a new norm. So one thing we don't do is we don't have a new norm. My new norm is you get up every fucking morning at 4 o'clock and you suffer. This is your new norm. That became my new fucking life. Most people want to get out of it. I said, no, motherfucker, this is your new life. This is who you are. Your new norm is you wake up and you suffer. And I started realizing if that's my mentality, this shit ain't hard anymore. Right. Your fucking new norm is you wake up, you get in the fucking You're gonna be here till this shit's fucking done. Whenever they say you're out, you get out. So my new norm, so I do that now today. My new norm now is if I'm doing a 200-mile run, your new norm now, man, is you fucking are doing 200 fucking miles. The Roger that mentality. That's it, man.

Rule number 4, act on your feelings.

I don't live on the surface of anything. Yeah. Surface is what got me where I was at. It got me from 175 pounds to 300 pounds. Telling everybody I'm good. I don't, I don't give a damn. I'm good. No, they're, they're hollow words. Mm-hmm. A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do it anymore. Everything that comes outta my mouth has substance, is real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds, in our souls. I act on mine. A lot of us who are afraid of something, We allow our minds to choose the path of least resistance, so we go a different route. I'm afraid of something, it's telling me you must do this thing. You must do that. Yeah. You have to go that way. And most of us don't understand that mentality. We go left and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives. It's because we continue to take the journey that is mapped out. And how I look at it is I, I, I talk in life Like, a lot of us in life want to take the 4-lane highway that has road maps and all this other stuff on it, man. Tells you where to go, gas stations. The next 10 miles up you're gonna see a McDonald's, a Cracker Barrel. Yeah. It's the easy route. Very few of us want to go to the right side.

Also, if you want to be confident like David Goggins and others, check out my 254 Confidence series. The link is in the description below and it's free.

You will never learn from people if we always tap dance around the truth. Everything I didn't want to do is what got me to where I'm at today.

Rule number 5: Adapt to the suck.

A lot of us dream big. You, you should dream big. Dreaming big is important. You know, some of us want to be doctors, lawyers, dentists. Some of us want to, you know, want to be in special operations. So you have this big dream. You can see it so clearly, like it's right in front of you. You can go out and touch it. But the thing about it is somewhere, if you dream big enough, somewhere down that journey, That dream becomes a nightmare. And what happens in that nightmare, you start to have all these questions. Like if you wanna be in special ops, you may not be a great swimmer. You may just realize that I'm not a great swimmer. I'm not a great runner. You may start to fail tests and all these questions start to flood your mind. Why am I here? I'm not good enough. Trust me, I know all about the fucking questions. They will flood your mind. If you do not have the answers for 'em, you will quit. The answers lie in the repetitions. You must not forget the repetitions you put into trying to dominate the craft that you're in today. Always, always embrace the suck, adapt to the suck.

Rule number 6: Use your cookie jar.

When you're afraid of something, you have to master it. That's how you start to overcome it. So what I realized when I get to that point where I want to quit— everybody, they get to the point where they want to quit. This is what happens. The mind tells you Let's go home. Let's take a warm shower. Let's get some food. This is not right. This is that. If you cannot answer the questions at that moment, 'cause your mind's gonna start giving you all these questions, all these questions, and if you can't answer them, you're gonna quit. What I realized when I was going through BUD/S, Ranger School, Officer, 100-mile race, 200-mile races, pull-up records, my mind would come creeping in. Like when I was doing 4,030 push-ups, at 2,000 pull-ups and my hands were ripped open, my mind said, "Look, brother, we've done all these other things. You've proven yourself. You're good." If I didn't have the answer to respond to my mind and say why I'm here, why I'm doing this, you will always lose that fight. You have to have the response to what your mind is gonna tell you. And another thing about that is Self-talk. A lot of people have like these big four on mental toughness. All that shit is crap about self-talk, visualization. It's true. But the thing about self-talk and all these things, they ask me, what do you think about when you're on mile 100 of a 205-mile run? What are you thinking about when you realize you've run for 24 hours and you have 24 more hours to run and yet another 105 miles? What goes through your mind? What do you say to yourself? I want to know. A lot of people think self-talk works. It does. But it doesn't work without the suffering before your mind starts saying, "We need self-talk." So what I tell myself is I go back to the months and years of preparation to get to that day. And I'm telling myself, the 3:30 in the morning, and I'm looking at my shoes, and I wanna go out there and run 30 miles. I have to, in that second, in that moment of this self-talk, my mind saying, "You gotta find more, you gotta find more," I once again calm down, go back into my mind, in my cookie jar, I call it, and I have to reflect back on the shit I did to get here, and that becomes my self-talk. Self-talk does not work unless it is real. Most of us lie to ourselves in this self-talk. It doesn't work. It has to be real. It has to be something that you've done to make it really work.

Rule number 7, live your life to the max.

You ask me, what haunts you the most? What haunts me the most is that if I would've died at 300 pounds, let's say I was 75 years old, I got to heaven and God has a chart like that on everybody's life. God knows all. Let's say that. I don't care what you believe in. Doesn't matter. I'm not judging anybody. But let's say my thing is God. You get to heaven, I'm 300 pounds, I sit down, I was a cockroach terminator my whole life, and we're sitting down just like this. You're God and I'm David. And he gives me that chart and he says, look at this. Now look at this chart, and on the chart it has all these different things, but my name's on it. But these things aren't me. I was gonna change the world. I was gonna, I was gonna set records. I was gonna be a Navy SEAL. I was gonna be All these things in the military that I accomplished, you're gonna get the VFW Award. You could be honored here, honored there. I'm like, God, I was— this isn't me. Like it says, David Goggins. I was an Ecolab guy. I sprayed for cockroaches and I'm 300 pounds. It said here I'm 185. It says here I got a bachelor's and a master's. It says all these things. And God goes, no, that's who you were supposed to be. Wow. My biggest fear in life is if there is a final resting place in this world and there's a final judgment and you talk to something much bigger than you. I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with someone, with something that says, you're in heaven. This is what you should have been on earth. And are you really in heaven now? Are you in hell? Mm-hmm. Thinking about how much I left on the table for fear, for not willing to go over the wall and over the next wall and over the next wall. So in my mind, I believe that, and God knows all. At least I believe that. I want God to be up there right now as we're speaking, writing stuff down, saying, my God, he exceeded even my expectations. That's how I live my life. I now know that there is no cap on the human mind. There's no cap. We cap it ourselves.

Rule number 8, take souls.

When you grow up weak and you start to master your mind, because my whole thing is whenever I'm, whenever I'm weak at something, wherever I'm scared of something, I master it. I was a weak mind, you know, a weak-minded person. So I mastered my mind and then mastered my mind. I mastered the human mind. And I realized why I no longer judge people, why I no longer put people on a pedestal, because we're all fucked up in our own way. We all have demons. Some people hide them better than other people. So I know we all have them. By me knowing that, I know that most alpha males are very fragile, very fragile. They never want to see another person harder than them, especially in that kind of realm. Ego attached, the ego, very strong. Ego will fuck you up every time. Ego is serious. So if I can hurt your ego, I got you. So by me having such a fragile ego growing up, all this was my advantage. I was doing a live autopsy on how fucked up I was. I was like, hey, this fucked me up. I better fuck other people up too. So I started using all these different tools and tactics to get in instructors' heads and the taking souls. That's where it happened, man. We were Wednesday, freezing cold. Everybody's jackhammering. Everybody's, everybody wants to, you know, everybody's just wanting to get through it now. Jackhammering is when you just can't stop shivering. You can't stop shivering. You know, you're sitting there, this uncontrollable jackhammering. Cameron, and the instructors take great pride in watching you suffer. They do. We, you know, in a, in a sick way, it's, it's, it's kind of funny, you know, you know, you were there once as a, as a student, now you're an instructor. But I knew, how would I be thinking if I was an instructor? I would love seeing this sadistic shit go on. But what would I, what wouldn't I like to see? I would hate to see some guys just looking like this is just another fucking day on the beach and go fuck yourself. I would hate to see that. So they all want to think like when they did it, they were harder. They were harder. Yeah, everybody's hard. So I said, you know what, man, it's time. You all— I can't fight you. You guys can fuck me up all day long. That's your job, and I love your job. I love what you guys are doing. You guys are making us better. But now I want to take the tactical advantage, and I'm going to start fucking with you. So I got my boat crew. Bill Brown. I had Chris Kyle on my boat crew, right? American Sniper. I had a couple hardcore And everybody right now is kind of like in their own world. Let's just get through this, man. I can't wait till Friday so we can graduate, how we can get going. I said, let's go ahead and have some fun. I said, we're gonna start, we're gonna start fucking with these guys. So the evolution here was we just got through with med check, you know, we're stripped down to nothing and they're checking us out, making sure we're good. You know, checking for pneumonia, checking for fucked up knees. My knee's all jacked up, but they're giving me shots and shit. And I was like the boat crew leader of boat crew 2. So I'm in the front of the boat and I tell our guys, this is what we're gonna do. The boat was like on our heads. So all it was, we're supposed to lift the boats up above our head. It's all you gotta do. But when you're this weak, you're this fragile, you're this tired, the boat's heavy. So there's a thing you can do when you do boat presses. You can get the boat and like just toss it up, toss it up and catch it. And that shows like you're jacked up. So everybody's holding the boat and they're shaking and the boat's starting to come down on their head and all the boat crews are all lined up and they're fucked up. And I'm looking at that and I turn around at my boat crew and I say, "Hey guys, it's time to fuck up." take some souls. They'd be like, what the fuck you talking about? I said, we're gonna get— I go, you see all these fucking instructors out here all in their fucking jackets and drinking coffee and laughing and smiling and shit? I want their fucking faces to go straight up numb. So we're gonna do this, we're gonna start boat pressing this motherfucker. Just take my lead, trust me, you'll get energy from it. We started throwing this boat up in the fucking air, catching it, throwing it up and catching it. We start yelling, can't hurt fucking boat crew too! We're yelling our fucking ass off and we doing it. And they make a stop, like, like, what the fuck? Like, stop. I look at instructors, and their faces literally looked like someone, like, just like took their soul out. I know where their minds were. Like, they were thinking about themselves. Like, what the fuck just happened, man? I know me on Wednesday, I couldn't have done that. How are they doing it? So the rest of the time going through Hell Week, it was like we just— we owned it, right? Boat Crew 2, we won every single race. We were just dominating. And, um, it was a, it was a strong boat crew. And that's where taking souls is, uh, there's a few taking soul stories, but that's one of them.

Rule number 9, use suffering to improve.

A lot of us don't know of a whole nother world that exists. It's on the other side of suffering. Once you break these barriers that you have made for yourself, Like, the mind is the most powerful thing in the world. In the world. It is so amazing that I used to be a 300-pound guy, and I thought that was it. Could barely read, could do anything. And now, that— what was inside that person was this guy that's in front of you today. That's how scary the mind is. And that's what I started realizing through this journey, is that once I got a taste of, wow, man, I haven't even cracked I haven't even begun to crack what the mind is capable of. And I started realizing is on the other end of suffering, that's the real growth of life, because you realize how the mind processes shit. And I talk about another thing called theory and practice. A lot of people are theorists. They— these smart guys that read these fucking books and shit, man, and they sit down, they tell you what the mind is supposed to do. And a lot of us listen to that shit. It becomes like, this is it, man. This, this old man who has been studying the mind forever. This is the cap that we have. By being a practitioner, I went out and realized a lot of these guys are so wrong, man. The mind has capabilities that are so unknown, and I found that through suffering. And there's a whole other world on the other end of that.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is do whatever it takes.

Sometimes we can be in such a bad spot in our lives that the only answer is to say fuck it and go for broke. In my life, 20-something years ago, I was in that spot. And this guy asked me a question yesterday. What was the question, Jennifer? He asked if you're paying the price physically now for what you put your body through. Am I paying the price? So my answer was yes. I am. But what he didn't know was literally I stepped back at 297 pounds, looked in the accountability mirror, and I saw a reflection I didn't like. It wasn't so much the outside, it was a lot of the inside. So that bothered me, and I was willing to do whatever it took to change that reflection. You gotta find out what you're willing to do The change reflects in that accountability mirror.

Now I've got a special bonus clip on how to discover who you are, but before that, it's time for the 3-point landing questions. Let's go from just watching another video to taking action. Here we go. Question number 1: What suffering will you use to improve? Number 2: Whose soul are you going to take this week? And number 3: Where do you need to change your mentality?

You have to learn What do you want in your life? We have so much influence coming at us that we are so lost. We don't know what we want to do because we don't spend enough time with ourselves. You have to learn to shut off a phone, shut off a computer, shut off a TV, and it's okay to sit in a room by yourself in a chair and just think about you. Where I want to be. Where do I see myself tomorrow, the next year, the next year from that? And it takes a lot of self-discipline to be able to do that nowadays, because you want to be so, so attached to everything. You want to be so caught up with the world. The world's moving too fast. The world's moving so fast that you're trying to keep up to the point where you lose yourself in the world. So you have to take that time and go to that dark place in your mind and discover who you are.

If you want more David Goggins, check out the top 50 rules video I made on him. The link is right there next to me. I think you'll enjoy it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

Whole thing about comfort zones is if you live in one for too long, that becomes your norm. You can outwork anybody no matter how badass they are.