Embrace the Darkness: David Goggins on Accountability, Mental Toughness, and Overcoming Mediocrity

Mediocrity is everywhere right now, and we're all trying to find an easy way out, and we're judging ourselves. Let's say there's 10 people in this room and we're all mediocre, but I'm the best of the mediocre people. I now think I'm great. I'm great. We surround ourselves around people that make us feel great. They tell us what we want to hear. The second we put ourselves amongst the uncommon people, We don't like that feeling, that challenging feeling of that person who's waking up at 3:30 in the morning, say, hey, put your on, we're going for a run. We don't like that challenge. We like that person who says, hey, you know what, man, I don't feel good today, man. And they say, oh, it's okay, brother, we'll take a day off, maybe we'll get a pizza and game. We like that. We, we love that feeling. Why? Because you understand, man, we're good, bro. We don't want like this. Hey, man, no, bro, get your "Come on, man. Stop being a punk." We don't want that in our lives. We don't want that person who's constantly challenging our weaknesses. We want that person who's constantly, you know, making us feel nice and good and secure in ours. That's the mediocrity of life. We want to be the best amongst the average people. People wonder, "How do you stay hungry all the time?" Because after I accomplish something, I don't sit back like a lot of guys who graduate BUD/S, graduate this, graduate that. They get comfortable. They wonder why I'm getting weak, man. I don't know, I lost my edge. What's going on? Because once you hit the top of the mountain, guess what happened? I'm good. I'm good. So you wonder why you're falling down now. Because once you reach the top of the mountain, you got to build another one. That's mediocrity. There's a lot of people in mediocrity who have a nice resume, but they're one-timers, man. They hit a one-time deal. They busted it open, got a lot of money. But they're good. You're mediocre now, man. What are you doing today, tomorrow, the next day? That's why I'm listening to theorists. I don't listen to all that. I listen to who's like this, man. What's wrong, man? I'm tired, dude. Why are you tired? Because tomorrow I gotta do the again, man. Whatever it is that made me nauseous and sick to my stomach, it made me hurt. There's no ending. And that's the person I listen to. That's the person who's gained knowledge. You gain knowledge through suffering. And on the other end of suffering is a world that very few, very few have ever seen. It's a beautiful world because that's where you find yourself. You don't find yourself in over here. You find yourself on the other end, like the 100-mile race I was on. I ran it for 24 hours. I found myself on the other end of that race. That 19 hours, I found, wow, there's a whole nother world out here that I've never even saw. But the world's in your mind, and that's what all that mediocrity is about. Mediocrity is contagious.

If you are the most ambitious person that you know, you are going to play small for life. Look around at your friends, your family, the people that you hang out with. What do they want out of life? If you're the one always pushing them and no one's pushing you, guess what happens? You don't get the push that you need and you stay in mediocrity, being the best in a group of unambitious people. So I just came back from an event in Florida that I was doing a keynote at, and at the end I challenged an entrepreneur who showed up to make some changes on his YouTube channel. We met over dinner, I helped him with his YouTube channel. It was him and his business partner sitting there, and I said, by tomorrow, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go in and make sure you have these things updated. And he said, yes, I'll do it. I said, it's important to do it by tomorrow because I'm still here. I'm still here in the morning. If you need anything, you can ask me face to face while I'm still here before I fly home to Toronto. Yes, I'll do it. Next morning comes around. We show up at a meeting. I got a meetup happening. We got, I don't know, 30 people who showed up to meet with me. And I see him out of the corner of my eye sitting at the back of the room and I say, hey, "Did you do the thing that I told you to do?" And he said, "No, I didn't do it." I said, "Why? What happened?" He said, "Well, we were doing lots of other stuff. It's been a full day. You know, we had this entire day of speaking and meeting people, and then so much information. We went home, we were doing all this kind of work." "Okay, great. But what about the promise that you made to me to do it?" And then his business partner chimes in and said, "You know, it's actually my fault. I told him Evan's probably not going to notice." He's not going to remember. Don't worry about it. We'll take care of it when we all fly back home. And so I told him, don't let your business partner's low standards prevent you from moving forward on the things that you said you were going to do. Staying committed to the thing that you say you're going to do, your word to yourself is the whole game. Forget about what you just say to other people. What do you do for yourself? Because we're often looking for nos. We're often looking for somebody else to give us a break. "Right, he's been working hard." And he is, and I know him and I know his business partner, and these guys are not slackers. They're not slackers. And I was poking a little bit at his business partner saying his low expectations, his low standards. But in this situation, it was true. The entrepreneur that I was speaking to said he was going to do this thing by tomorrow morning before he came and went to my event. He would do it. And his business partner says he's not going to remember Don't worry, we've worked too hard already. Let it go. We'll do it when we get home. And they would do it when they got home. I know they would. He's looking for the reason not to do it. When you say you wanna hit the gym, when you say you wanna hit these business goals, when you say you wanna have this outcome and be proud of the effort that you put in every day, when you say that you're gonna do something, there will be moments where you wanna let yourself off the hook, where you say, ah, I worked so hard, or I'm so tired, or I deserve a break, right? This is the language you use to yourself. When that happens, you're looking for affirmations from the people around you. And if you are the most ambitious person in your friend group, if you are the most ambitious person, what's gonna happen? They're gonna say, "You already work so hard anyway. What are you talking about? Yes, of course. Give yourself the break." And it's the exact answer that you're looking for, 'cause you wanna give yourself a break. Now, if you're proud of your effort, maybe you should take a break. But it's not because somebody with lower standards gave you the pass. It's because you're proud of the effort that you put in. And so this is where it gets really dangerous. When you are the most successful, the most ambitious person, from the people around you, they're always gonna give you a reason to play smaller. You can't accept it. You have to push through. You need to change your environment. I'm gonna give you 3 ways to do it. Step number 1 is collect good people. I like to say I'm in the business of collecting good people. You wanna collect good people. Somebody that you meet on the street, at an event, online, collect them. Find ways to stay in touch. Follow them on Instagram and on YouTube and comment on their stuff. Tell them, sometimes this gets super awkward, I've told people, I really like you, I really love your style, I really like everything you're doing, I just wanna stay in touch. And maybe that means you're just DMing them when you have questions, maybe that means you're setting something formal up or you're having a coffee meeting every month to connect, maybe that means you're asking them business questions whenever you have them. There's a lot of different ways that the relationship can take shape And this is where a lot of people fall down, is you expect to have the answer in your head, and when you don't know what the relationship will look like, you don't go for it because you don't know what to present. You don't know what to pitch. You don't know what to say. And so you say nothing. And that's the worst-case scenario. Don't do that. Tell somebody, "I love your vibe. I love the energy. How do we stay in touch?" And then whatever flows, flows. You have to be in the business of collecting good people. You want good people around you, not just for your team, but people who are your peers, people who can be your mentors. Because when you get that situation, when you say, "I promised myself that I would do this tomorrow, I promised myself that before tomorrow morning this would happen," the people around you are saying, "Dude, what are you doing? Let's go!" Not, "Ah, you work so hard, you deserve a break." No, "Let's go! You promised yourself you would do it, come on!" They pull you up to be the best version of you. Step number 2 is get aspirational mentors. I love being around people who've done a lot more than me. This is actually my default. I don't really have people in my life who push me to be better. I don't have too many people around me say, Evan, you really suck at this. Let's go, get better, get better, get better. I get most of mine from aspirational mentors, from, from Steve Jobs and AP Giannini and Howard Schultz and Kanye West. The videos that I put up every single day on my channel So I had a buddy of mine say, "I really love it when you do a David Goggins video." Or another one yesterday said, "I really love it when you do Kobe Bryant." Great. If you know that Kobe inspires you or David inspires you, then surround yourself with him, right? Watch their YouTube videos, watch their interviews, have a Google alert that comes at any time it says Kobe Bryant interview or David Goggins interview, you get a notification. Listen to their podcast if they have one, read their book, listen to their audios. Right? As much as possible, be around that, because the more you are around that, they're training you to think like they think. They're pulling you up to their level, even if you never meet them. That's what I try to do with my channel every day, is I need it selfishly for myself. There's people that I surround myself with daily. I want Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey and these people pulling me up to make me better. So get yourself some aspirational mentors, the people that you look up to and say, man, I wish I could be like them. You can. You just have to think like them, and the way to think like them and act like them and have the mindset of them is to be around them more often. And step number 3 is have play bigger triggers. I like having triggers in my environment that force me to remind myself of who I am, of who I would like to be, of what I'm becoming. So you can have the greatest day of all time, maybe you watch this video and you're fired up, you get motivated, you say, "Yes, I'm gonna go and do some work, awesome." You're gonna wake up tomorrow and be the person who you used to be again. You wake up tomorrow and it's a new day. Every day is a new day. And so you might remember to do something, but chances are you may not. And so that's why having play bigger triggers in your environment, you set them up once and it reminds you to go off and play a bigger game. So my office, there's a bunch of play bigger triggers here, right? There's mentors of mine, including my parents, who are looking at me every time I walk into here. There's the awards down here, which remind me of what I do, that a million people have subscribed to my channel. Now we're at 2. It's a crazy number that when I'm coming to make a video, Lots of people are watching it. I have my neck braces down there to remind myself of when I broke my neck and kept going on my tour. I've got my Doritos here to remind myself that I'm stronger than these Doritos. Damn the Doritos. These things are stronger than me? No, all I wanna do is eat this bag every single day. And standing here is a reminder of how awesome I am. At least that's what I'm telling myself, right? They're all play bigger triggers. So what's in your physical environment? What's the background on your cell phone? What's the background on your desktop? How can you set up your environment once, just with some thoughtful thinking once, that then every time you walk into it, it lifts you up? Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight all of the lessons learned in this video, as well as pull out our 3 favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, there's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there.

People say, man, you cuss all the time. Why? Well, I hate to say it, the best way for me to get how I feel across— I can't sit here and say, you know what, yeah, I went through Hell Week and man, it was really hard. No, that takes your damn soul, rips it inside out, and then they say, now we're going to start. It allows me to express where I was at, at a point of my life. If I don't give you all of me, why the hell am I here? Why? How will you learn from me? People take so much offense to me. You will never learn from people if we always tap dance around the truth. Oh God, I love that. We tap dance around the truth by finding the right words. I don't hurt you because you have thin skin. No, tighten up, people. It's okay. Trust me, it's okay. You might be called nigger one day. It's okay. You might be called some Jewish word or some gay word. It's okay. Let them call you that. What are you going to do now? They don't own your life. How are you going to control that now? How are you going to flip it upside down and say, Roger that, now I'm going to harness it and you'll read about me years from now? How? That's the question. How are you going to do that? Thicken your skin. Become more of a human being. Don't be afraid of the reflection in the mirror, because that's all you can be afraid of. Once you overcome the reflection in the mirror, you've done it. I love that, man.

You once said that if you were growing up in this generation, that you would have a field day because you would take their souls. What did you mean by that?

The younger generation quits. Not everybody. So I gotta, I gotta put that people get their butt hurt. So not everybody. Most of this generation quits the second they get talked to. You did this wrong, you did this wrong, or they get yelled at. It's so easy to be great nowadays because everybody else is— most people are weak. This is a softened generation. So if you have any mental toughness, any ability, if you have any fraction of self-discipline, The ability to not want to do it but still do it. People have a hard thing to understand. I hate to run. And what makes me so crazy— it doesn't anymore— is people go, well, why do you run if you hate it? What are you talking about? I don't want to take showers and eat either. I hate that too. The whole— that's life, man. And it wasn't until I changed that mentality that I became somebody. I hated going to school, so guess what? I was dumb. That's what— 1 1 is 2. But if you can get through to doing things that you hate to do, on the other side is greatness. That's what people understand. By me running, I am callous in my mind. I'm not training for a race, I'm training for life. I'm training for the time when I get that 2 o'clock in the morning call that my mom is dead or something happens tragic in life. I don't fall apart. Mm-hmm. I'm training my mind and my body, my spirit, so it's all one, so I can handle what life is gonna throw at me. Because the life I've lived, it throws a whole bunch at you. And if you're not physically and mentally prepared for that, you're just gonna crumble and you're good for nobody.

Talk to me about what it takes to be on one side of a door in Iraq or anywhere knowing on the other side of the door are people who are not afraid of you. They're ready for you to come in and you still have— and they have guns and you still have to breach that door.

That's a great question. It— that's a very scary situation when you are on one side of the door and your mind is racing because on the other side of that door It could be no one. It could be 4 guys with 4 AK-47s. That door you're about to open could be booby-trapped. So once you open it, boom, your legs are gone. So there's 1,000 things you think about when you're the first guy, second guy, third guy, getting ready to go in a room and flood it. And that's why I talk about the warrior mentality. And that's why so many people are lost. When I start talking, you have the right, you're lucky that you don't have to think like warriors think. You're very privileged. I chose this world to be a warrior, and I would choose it again if I came back to this world. But the mentality of a warrior is very different than normal mentality. You must be that person on that door, getting ready to open it, thinking to yourself, If I die, so be it. The only way you can go in that door is knowing there's a great chance you're gonna die. Like being a SEAL, you train with live ammo, you jump out of airplane, every, every, everything you do, you could die. So to be a warrior, why people don't understand me, I'm glad you don't understand me. Merry Christmas, good on you. Because being a warrior takes a whole different mindset, a whole different mindset to know that there's a great chance I may not be in the middle. Like I was in for 21 years. I'm lucky. I'm very lucky that I'm alive, able to talk to you, able to still run. But when you sign up on that dotted line to be a, like a SEAL, your mentality changes. Mm-hmm. I may not live. You gotta accept that. And that's the mentality you have. And that's what makes you a warrior. If you're scared to die, you're a bad warrior.

And so what do you use to push through? Is that a Goggins moment? Is that finding the darkness? I'm going through hell, I'll become the devil if I have to. Like, what is that moment? What are you pulling up inside?

I'm pulling up a lot of the dark side of me. But I'm also looking at the guys to my left and to my right, realizing that we're here together, man. and I have to, uh, I have to be strong for them and they gotta be strong for me. A lot of people, either you like me or you don't, even in the SEAL teams. But when you get to that door or you get on that mission or you get in that op, all that shit's out the door, man. You know, you, you do it honestly. I mean, people say all the time in these movies, you, you, you really out there fighting for that guy beside you and you can't be a coward. 'Cause you know what, and this is how I look at everything I do now in life, and this sums it up. I hated jumping outta airplanes. I hated shooting guns. I hated the job as a Navy SEAL, but I did it because I wanted to change myself. Everything I do, I'm not really comfortable doing. But if you choose to go that route, to go be a Navy SEAL, You might as well go be the hardest in the world. Cuz if you're choosing to do something, you have two routes. You can go there and be a little, a little weak person.

Mm-hmm.

And get through barely, and that's your reputation. Or you can go through the hardest guy you can possibly be, and that's your reputation. So my whole thing is, if you're gonna choose to open that fucking door in Iraq or Afghanistan, open the fucking door, go in hard because they're gonna remember you. By slowly opening it and peeking in. So if you're gonna open it and you made the mind to open it, don't crack it open.

Mm-hmm.

Open the fucking door, go in. That's what life, if you're choosing to do, if you're choosing to do something, attack it because they're gonna remember you as not attacking it. So I want to be remembered. You can hate me, but there's one thing you can't say about me. I didn't attack it. So that's the mentality you have. If you're gonna do something, you might as well attack it. 'Cause you could do it anyway.

Right. Do you use that in civilian life? Do you still employ the, "I'm gonna attack it, I'm gonna take their souls"? How does that play out in a non-combat zone?

It still works for me in life as far as attacking things, because no matter what avenue I choose, I wanna be the very best. And the very best may not be I'm number one, The very best is did I leave everything inside of me out there? So attacking is not like, oh, I wanna win this or win that or be the best. The best is I'm, I'm, I'm running against myself in everything I do. And, and that's, and that's what I attack. I attack myself. I'm always questioning myself. I'm always holding myself accountable. So many people before I give them a workout plan, they're talking about recovery. Everybody, everybody that hears me speak, They want to go straight to recovery. Work out first. Huh. Work out first before you talk to me about recovery.

How to recover, yeah.

Work out first. We are always looking for, like, whenever I talk to people, people take my words and they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable. This guy, you know, they want to put you in a box. They want to put a title on you. No, you're putting a title on me to make yourself feel better about yourself. If you read this book of mine and you see where I came from, this person was, this, this person was not built. This, this, this person was not made by God. Mm-hmm. This person, sorry, this person was built. I made this person. I made this person by diving into the insecurities that life gave me, cuz now they're yours. They're yours to own. If you're not smart, call yourself dumb. It's okay. Cuz you are. But take that knowledge, you putting yourself down. If you're fat, call yourself fat. I used to be 300 pounds. Mm-hmm. We, we wanna talk so soft to ourselves. We're looking for that recovery day and that recovery day is everything in your life. Everything in your life is a recovery day. We're looking for it. It's not coming. It's not coming. Mm-hmm. Get over that recovery day. And that's the mentality I took with me. And what happened through that process was all the frivolous things of life started to float away. I used to tell people lies so they would like me. Mm-hmm. Cause I was so insecure. When you start to build yourself up and start to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence. Yeah. Real Authentic confidence from hard work. Everything else goes away. You, you no longer look to other people for your self-esteem, for validation, for—

yeah.

You now know I walk in the room now and I know the hours and years and decades I put into David Goggins. That's something. It's not on the wall. It's not a trophy on the wall. It's not a medal around your neck. It is actually a feeling in your heart. And people go, why don't you ever smile? I don't have to.

Yeah.

Yeah. I do have a stoic look on my face. I'm a, I'm a very focused person, but the feeling I have in my soul and in my heart, that's why I don't need to smile. I don't need to smile. I don't need you to look at me and say, oh my God, you look happy. Cause half us aren't happy. Mm-hmm. We're, we're giving you something that we think you want to see. I don't do that anymore. I don't care how you perceive David Goggins. Because through my journey, I figured out the one piece I was missing. I thought it was cars. I thought it was women. I thought it was, I thought it was money. I thought it was everything. The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. Mm-hmm. One big thing is the accountability mirror. Mm-hmm. You have to start with yourself. So what happened in, in my life was we start to get, I call it like the rucksack. A rucksack is a pack that you carry in the military and you put all your stuff in it, your radios, your food, your water, all All that stuff you have to carry in the military, that's your rucksack. It's a backpack pretty much. As you're growing up, we all have a backpack. Most of ours hopefully is empty, you know, and what we put in it is all the crap we go through in life. That's what is in the backpack for the civilians and we carry it around with us. So what you have to start doing is realizing that no matter where you're at in life, I got called nigger a lot. My dad abused me, you know, learning disability, stutters, immaturity, insecurities, self-doubt, so much crap on top of me, so much stuff. I lied a lot to create friends so people— so much stuff was in my backpack. No one's coming back to help me. So it starts with that person in that mirror. You have to realize you are on your own now. And whatever else you believe in, I don't care what you believe in, but On Earth, it's a very lonely journey. And it starts with the accountability mirror of looking at saying, "Hey, my daddy beat the hell outta me, he's not coming back. All these things are coming back. I have to face myself." And you have to own all those things that people may have done to you. Now it's yours. You gotta own it. It's yours now to fix the problems that people did to you. It makes no sense. It's not fair. I get it. But if you live in that "woe is me" mentality, of, guess what, my dad did this to me, my mom did this to me, people who bully did this to me, you're gonna always live right there. You have to figure out ways to move forward 'cause you're not coming back. And it starts with the mirror. And I call it the accountability mirror in the book. My biggest advice to give everybody in the world is, like I say, we live in an external world. Everything is, you gotta see it, touch it, it's external. If you can, for the rest of your life, live inside of yourself, stop listening to people who are calling you fat, gay, transsexual, nigger, everything that makes no sense. All these insecure people putting their insecurities on you, you gotta flush it out. You gotta just be whoever the hell God, or whoever the hell you believe in. If you believe in nothing but yourself, I don't care what it is. You gotta take everything and throw it away. You have to believe in one thing, and that is yourself. And, and I'm not saying don't believe in God or what you believe in, but right now, for you to find greatness in yourself, you're not going to find it by looking in a book or by even hearing me. I may give you the spark, but you've got to go inside yourself to find it. And that means you got to be quiet. Shut up. Go in a room. Stop talking, search your soul, search your mind, search your abilities, and you'll find it. But if you're not looking for it, you won't find it. So you gotta go start your journey, and the journey starts with you finding, why the hell am I here on this planet Earth? Why am I here? If you don't know that, you will live the rest of your life searching, always asking the question, why?

With your learning disability, with your dad beating you, screaming at you, emotionally challenging your mind, with, uh, the racism you dealt with, with, um, the different struggles you felt with bullies. What was the hardest obstacle to overcome from up until about 15, 16?

The hardest obstacle was myself. I started realizing more and more and more that all these people were gone. What was haunting me was me. I can't control my dad. I can't control the people calling me nigger. I can't control all these things, but they were things that kept me down. It started becoming my reality. My reality was what they made it out to be, and I became a whole— the most important conversation you'll ever have with your life, you know, in your life is when you have yourself. Mm-hmm. And my conversation was absolutely horrifying.

What were you saying to yourself?

I'm dumb. I'm nobody. My dad, I mean, my dad was great in mental warfare. A drunk, insecure man. Mm-hmm. Will make everybody around him feel like hell. Yeah. Because he wants to give you no power. And that's why he was so mean to my mom and myself and my brother. 'Cause he didn't want anybody to get above him. Mm-hmm. He wanna keep you down low. So when you're growing up with all this stuff, all this hate, and it wasn't the beatings, I could take the beatings all day. It was the mental torture. So when at a young age, your, your parents put a dialogue in you of confidence or you're nobody. Mm-hmm. So that voice in my head was, I'm a loser. And then it was confirmed when I got in school and in third grade I was falling behind. They wanna put me in a, in a special school.

Yeah.

You know, with kids who can't learn. Right. Then it was confirmed what, you know, what my dad was saying. So that confirmed it. Then I started cheating. So I started realizing, you know what, I'm taking the easy way out again. Yeah. And it started snowballing from there. Now, now the kids are calling me nigger.

Mm-hmm.

But it wasn't all the kids. So what happens is you start to get this picture that everybody hates you because your reality becomes so, so big.

Mm-hmm.

That you don't, I mean, you can't see the clear picture.

It might've been 3 or 4 kids.

That's it.

Doing it over and over.

Right. But it was a whole town.

Yeah.

Everybody hated me. So started—

The world hates me.

That's right.

Yeah.

And that's when it, that's when it became toxic. And that is where I became my worst enemy. My junior year in high school and I fell back a lot. I fell back in this hole of life. The second you think that you've overcome it and you climbed Everest, You're on that last hold and life will say, "Not today," and it'll push you down. And my junior year in high school, I missed a whole bunch of school, was lying to my mom, had like a 1-point-something GPA. I was just jacked up. I mean, I was in one of the worst spots in my life. And my mom was going through a lot of shit too, and she didn't have time to sit back and baby me. And it was me against me. My pants down to my knees. I was just, I was not, whatever was going on, I was in a bad shape. So I went to the bathroom and I had this weird haircut cuz I wanted attention. I was an attention getter. I went to an all-white school pretty much. Some of the kids liked me, a lot of 'em didn't like me, whatever. I was looking for something. So I would dress differently, crazy haircuts. And I went to the mirror and the reflection in it revealed a lot of bad things, a lot of things that I was hiding behind the saggy pants. And I'm looking at myself in the mirror going like, God dog, dude, you are something else, man. Like, you have created a character. I want to be at the cool guy table, and whatever I could do to get attention, I did. It wasn't me. It wasn't who I was inside, but I was scared for anybody to know who I was inside. So in that accountability mirror, I call it, I got real with myself. I said, you have a third grade reading level, which is hard to admit when you're a junior in high school that you copied on every single thing you did because of fear they were gonna put me in a special school. We all know what special means. I'm gonna have a title on myself the rest of my life. And being cool, you don't wanna have a title on yourself. So I started cheating. I was dumb and people say, oh, you know, you had a learning disability. I had a learning disability, but I realized I was lazy. So, um, I called myself out there. I called myself out every which way possible. I didn't call myself out. I was just honest. I was honest. Look at yourself, man. Look at yourself. And it was that day and a couple other days after that, I just got real with myself. And every day I came home, I called it the accountability mirror. What am I gonna do today to change what I see in this mirror? What am I gonna do today? And a lot of it was I stopped sitting with the cool guys. I actually tucked my shirt in and went to school looking like, hey man, this is how I'm gonna look. If you don't like it, so be it. I had to really wear this layer of skin. I had to develop a really calloused skin on me to take whatever you're gonna call me, you're gonna call me, whatever I'm gonna be. You know, I wasn't a geek. But whoever I am, you're gonna see me. You're gonna see me for who I am, 'cause I need to change who I'm not. And that accountability just became raw. And when I became fat over the years, 'cause I fell back in the hole, I called myself fat, 'cause I was fat. And people don't wanna do that. They wanna say, "Oh, don't call yourself fat. Don't call yourself dumb." If you're not real and raw with who the fuck you are, nothing's gonna change. And in this nice new world that we live in, We want to hear, "You're just a little big." No, man, you might be fat. And it's okay to hear that from yourself and from everybody else. So that's where it started at. And it's raw, it gets ugly sometimes with me in that mirror, but I'm also proud of myself to be able to tell myself that and then fix what's in that mirror. SEAL training became pretty hard and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL prep program.

Like a boot camp for the boot camp.

That's right. And it was 2 months in my last 2 years before I retired from the military, they sent me there to train these kids. Wow. To get ready for BUD/S.

18, 19, 20-year-olds, yeah.

Young kids. So when they get to Navy SEAL training, man, they were physical studs. They were running, swimming. I mean, they were, they were hybrids. Wow. But they get to BUD/S and the same amount of people would quit. Why is that? This is why. We were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters. Hmm. It's not about—

not the mind.

That's right. We weren't diving into the sewer. Everybody's got a story. We don't share it on social media. We share our nice life on social media. We have, we all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine.

Yeah.

Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I'm gonna talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys' minds. I wasn't building that so-called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week, it would draw on something that made them very insecure and they look for comfort. Whenever hardness comes, and y'all know what it is, It may be different for you than it is for me, but you go back to your insecurities. And then when you go back to your insecurities, you then look for comfort within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you when you were sad, when you were sick. We look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort. It's in those moments you must retrain your mind. To think differently in hell. I wasn't training them to do that.

Why weren't you training?

I wasn't training myself to that. Cuz at that time I was doing what I was told. Mm. These guys need to meet a standard, physical standard, a physical standard. The physical standard is not what they need to meet. It's a mental standard you must meet in life. We live in a world now that's so kind. We find the kind way around everything. Like, if you don't look good, I have to find a kind way of saying, "I don't like your shirt." Right. That's not the approach. If that's the approach you're looking for, that book is not for you. "Can't Hurt Me" is not for you. The approach you have to take, at least I took, you take whatever approach you want, the conversation had to be a real honest conversation in the accountability mirror of, guess what? I was fat. Don't find a kind word to say that, you know what, I've gained some weight. No, you're fat. When I couldn't read, not like, hey, you know, you have a learning disability. No, I cannot read. I have a 4th grade reading level. I'm struggling. And sometimes I call myself stupid, not in a way to put myself down. So don't take it like, my God, those are so hurtful. Yeah, they're hurtful. That's honest. The conversation has to become an honest conversation of where you're at mentally. Where am I at mentally? I look like— I feel like I'm not this— I'm falling behind in school, I'm lazy, my house is a mess. You have to look at what it is and call it what it is. Don't find words to make yourself feel better because that's what— so we hang around people that make us feel better. That tell us what we want to hear, not what we need to hear. And so we stay away from those people. And we stay away from those people, like our internal dialogue becomes that kind, "It's okay." It's not okay. So that's where it starts. It starts with that accountability of, "It's not okay anymore. This can no longer be okay." And calling yourself out for exactly what you are and exactly how you need to fix it. So 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. Yep. The first thing I did versus closing my mind, you're like, oh my God, that's crazy. I went and got a penny and said, 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. But 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, by facing yourself. And through that, I, I would die never knowing that I had the power to change millions of lives. And what haunts me the most, people ask me, what, 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. The world is so fast-paced. The world is so noisy. So my conversation now a lot of times is, my God, slow down. The world can take you here, here, be here, be there, be everywhere. And I lose myself sometimes. So I catch myself in the airport, I catch myself in the plane where I'm writing stuff down. Okay, remember this, remember that. And I'll go, hey, hang on a second, Goggins, what got you here? This isn't what got you here. Slow down. Go back to the quiet place of that dirty mirror in that $7 a month place you used to live in. That's where you grew. You— so I— so that's what I'm constantly reminding myself. Go back to your roots. I'm not saying go back to hell, but I'm saying don't forget where you come from as you start to explode out of the gate when you become someone. My conversation is, do not forget your roots. Do not forget your roots. Don't let this become so big that you lose yourself amongst the noise. Go back to the quietness of what made you successful. I believe that most human beings are only living at about 40% of their capability. So the mind has a governor, like a car. If you're driving a car and the car has a governor on it, the car may say 130 miles an hour, but the governor is set for 91. Once that governor sets in, you get to 91, that car starts doing this. The car wants to go, the car wants to go, but that factory said, uh-uh, we're not going past 91. We have a factory, a nice governor in our brain, and it's a survival mechanism. It protects us from pain and suffering. The second we feel that, our mind says, oh no, this isn't fun. We should back off. We should sit down, find something more comfortable. And there's something about the mind. The mind has the tactical advantage over you at all times. At all times of your life, the mind has a tactical advantage over you. Why is that? It knows what you're afraid of. It knows your insecurities. It knows your deep, dark lies. And it starts to push you away from that. It pushes you in a direction that is comfortable. The mind controls everything. So what I realized was that when I was growing up and I was 300 pounds and I got all fat and I got all insecure, I realized that my mind kept taking me in this direction. When things got uncomfortable for me, when I was facing my insecurities, I was facing my fears, my mind said, oh no, we have the tactical advantage. We need to get you, separate you from this feeling, this feeling over here. Life's all about feelings. We want the happy feeling. We don't want that feeling of this sucks, why am I here? And you don't have any— so you can't answer those questions, so you leave. I started realizing that if in that moment you can answer those questions and you are now in charge of your brain versus your brain ruling you That's where all that stuff comes from. So, so, so the 40% rule is all of that. You get to 40%, your brain says, we're done, let's roll, man. This is starting to get painful. This is uncomfortable. So you sit down, you have to figure out ways, and everybody's different. That's how the book kind of talks about, like, we all have these things about, you know, 5 steps to this and, and 4 steps to this. It's, it's a lot more than that. That's all bullshit. It's, it's a practice that you have to, it's a habit. So if you know that at 40%, I'm still, you know, I'm feeling pain. At 40%, I'm feeling pain. That's where the 40% rule kicks in. Now it starts, okay, I'm feeling pain. My mind's saying all this to me. It's saying, get out of here, run, flee. The fight or flight kicks in. Okay, we're done. We're not good enough. It starts telling you all these things. You start to believe it because the mind controls all. This is the time where you have to gain control back of your mind and say, okay, let me see if I can go 45%. And once you start giving yourself more and more hope and start realizing, okay, the mind starts to be, okay, what are you doing? We're supposed to be going right and you're going left. You start then controlling your mind, start finding more in, you know, in yourself. And then it goes from 40% to a lot further than that. But that's the start of it though. Get to, get to the spot where your mind is saying stop, wherever that is. You gotta get there first. And then that's when that starts to work for you. You gotta control yourself in that moment.

What was the greatest lesson your mom taught you growing up?

Honestly, the greatest lesson she ever taught me is a lesson that she, she doesn't know how much she taught me because she wasn't much in the teaching mode. My dad took her soul. Mm-hmm. But what I did as a young kid is I observed everybody. I wasn't really smart in the books. Yeah. But I was real smart when it came to life. Yeah. And I was able to sit back and watch her mistakes. I was able to see how she struggled through life and how I don't want to struggle through life. And I was able to see, she never picked me up. The biggest thing she did for me, and this is honest to God truth, and she doesn't even know she did it. Mm-hmm. When I would bust my ass, when I would fail. Yeah. When I was at the bottom of the sewer, she never picked me up. She never gave me that cookie and said, hey son, you know, it's gonna be okay. She didn't have time for that. And sometimes she gets upset when I talk about my past because it paints her out to be not the best mom. If I had any kind of mom in that kind of environment, I would've never made it. Mm. Because she forced me, for whatever reason, she forced me to, you better figure this out. Or you're gonna be a statistic.

Wow.

And this is something that she didn't sit down and tell me. I realized this, this is the world that is in front of me. And what most people do is they see this world and they look at it as an excuse to get out of it.

Yeah.

I started looking at it as this is the ultimate training ground for the rest of my life. Mm-hmm. I have all these valuable lessons. 'Cause if you look out in the world right now today, it's not a nice place, but I'm very prepared for it.

Yeah, you are.

I'm prepared for it. I'm prepared for all the failure coming my way. I'm prepared for everything my way. And that's the biggest lesson that she taught me by not teaching me. Mm-hmm. By never saying it's gonna be okay. Yeah. Matter of fact, she told me the exact opposite. Life sucks. When you really sit back at your life and you are in that dark room, and you're looking at where you started from and you tell yourself, ah, dog, man, my mom is this way. My soon-to-be stepdad got murdered. My dad beat the shit out of me. I can't read and write to save my fucking soul. I've lied about it to everybody. I've cheated on all these tests. My God, man. And then you put a goal in your mind. How are you gonna feel, man, when you accomplish this goal? Coming from that. A lot of people start from a good starting point, they have a good foundation. What if you can surpass all these? What if everybody who was way up here started up here and you had— you started with no legs, you had to grow legs to even start walking and then crawling and then running, and then you start passing people and all this given to them? I had to use all this negative that was making me weak and horrible as a person. I had to use this as the power that now fueled me. I had to flip it on its head and say, hold up, this might be exactly what I need. The darkness is exactly what I need. It's how you look at your situation. And I was looking at it all.

In the book, you tell people to make a list of everything working against them, every real valid excuse, right? Why do you have them do that?

There's a lot of power in that list. So in that list of who you are, what makes you all these other things, it goes back to once again accepting. You have to first accept it before you can fix it. A lot of people walk around, oh man, I'm good, I'm good. No, you're not. You have to accept what you're not. You have to, and people don't want to do that. And that's the only way you can fix it. You have to accept it first before you can go on the journey. A lot of folks never even start the journey, man. They never start the journey because they live in this fake life that who they want to be, they act like they are, but they're not because they haven't fixed all this stuff yet. You got to fix this first before we can start our journey in life. So that's why I have them make this list. You fix these problems, now your journey can begin because you no longer care about how people are judging you. When you care more about how someone's judging you, you're going to stay right there. There's no forward momentum. So that's the whole thing about that list. When I picked up your book, the thing I loved about it is the amount of effort that you've been through to give us— I'm sure this was suffering too, like writing this book— the amount of effort that you've been through to actually give us detail, right, on your life. We all have different things in our life that have scarred us. We wanna act like those scars don't exist. So those scars, like, you know, if you go out and you get cut, that scar's gonna be there on your arm. You can go down and look at that cut and say, oh, or that scar and say, oh, that happened from, you know, I was in the kitchen or what happened. We have the same thing on our brain. I have all these scars on my brain from growing up, from, you know, being abused, from, suffering through life, from having a learning disability, from stuttering, from having just a really bad childhood. And so all those memories, I had to cut open that scar and go into it. And that was a hard process for me to do. Not only was that a hard process for me to do, for me to have the courage to share that with people, you know, because I'm the so-called toughest man on the planet, so they think. So for me to break open that shell and tell people, hey, That wasn't always me. You know, it's hard to do, you know? It's hard to do. So it was a tough process. Throughout this journey, I started becoming this new person. I started creating this new person. People started seeing me as this amazing superhero. In the back of my mind, I knew the real story. And I was like, man, one day you have to really share it. I'm like, man, but do you have the courage? You know, like, it's great to live right here. I've established this. People think you're great. Just stay here. Don't go back. Let's not go back. But the only way you can help people out is let them know that this is possible. So I had to go back and say, this is where I come from. Yeah. And where I come from is hell. A lot of people can live with themselves, look in the mirror and say, I'm okay with being afraid. I'm okay with going on this easy highway over here. The easy highway has all these signs. Directions, how to get somewhere. And you have to first be uncomfortable with how you feel about yourself, with that voice that a lot of us like to run away from. We all have it. We all have that voice that say, hey man, you know, you're, you're kind of wimping out right now. You're kind of being a little punk right now. But a lot of us say, okay, that's okay. It's okay to tell these little white lies to ourselves. So we first have to face the real you. The real me is David Goggins. The real me is a guy looking at you right now saying, I don't want I don't want to be on this show right now because I used to stutter as a kid, and I'm afraid of that. I'm afraid that here in a second I'm gonna start stammering and stuttering, and the whole world is going to know that I have all these issues. But that's when I see right now, okay, Goggins, you got to go on this show. That's Goggins. Goggins is saying, okay, David Goggins, you're a punk. Life made you this way. We can't live like this. We can't live in fear. We can't live in judgment. We can't be afraid of what people right now are looking at me saying about me. We cannot be afraid of that. That's Goggins. Goggins saying, all of you who don't like me, who don't want to— and that person then comes in. But you have to be David Goggins and say, man, I'm afraid of this. I'm here. Life made me this way. Here I stutter. I have these issues with reading and writing, and I'm I'm fat and I'm insecure. You have to face that in that dark room. In that dark room is who you are, but in that dark room is where you have to create another human being that walks out of that dark room to face who you are. That's the only way you're going to get over all those things. You have to create someone else. Not like you have two different personalities. It is you. But you have to find strength. And that visualization of almost me cracking out Goggins, like almost like that Superman cape, like I'm coming out a different person, a person that doesn't give a fuck about anything, who doesn't care about being judged, who knows I'm weak, who knows I'm afraid, who says, "Whatever you think about me, take it, whatever. I'm here." That's Goggins. In the dark room, you face yourself, You realize you want to be better. You realize you don't want to be this weak, insecure person in the world who has all these problems that we all have. We all have. Social media is a great platform to tell you who we want to be, not who we are. So that's where that dark room is. When I say suffering, people cringe. People, that's the, that's the one word whenever I post about it, people cringe. It's not about suffering, how people may look at suffering. Like you have to just go to a place that just every day of your life is suffering. You have to tap into suffering every day of your life because we have so much scarring that we have to clean up. You have to look at suffering as almost like I look at failure. To succeed, you must fail. In failure and in suffering, all the answers are in there. All the answers to all the test questions. The test is your life. All the answers are in there. You don't have to live in suffering and pain and failure all the time. You have to learn, I need to visit it. Like, people hate working out. You're only going to visit working out maybe an hour a day. 23 other hours of the day, you're not in it. But how you become in shape is you must visit suffering, visit working out, 1 hour a day. Visit suffering 1 hour a day. Visit your past failures 1 hour a day. The relationship with it is the answers are in there. They, they are in there within the suffering. Go in there. And I call it the live autopsy. The live autopsy. How you find out someone died? They crack you open after you're dead. How you can live is do it while you're alive. Go back in your brain, crack it open while you're alive. Don't wait until you're dead to figure out why you died. Do it while you are living. Go in there, go into the suffering, go into the pain of your life and say, why did this suck for me so bad? Why am I afraid of all this stuff? Why have I shut down the whole world? I guarantee I'll tell you why you shut down the whole world. It's in these nooks of the suffering within your brain, in the scarring, are all the answers to why you are on the couch feeling sorry for yourself. They lie within the scars. Visit them for at least an hour a day, study them, and then you'll find out more about yourself. You will then grow. So don't look at it as every day I suffer. Go into it an hour a day. Learn from yourself, learn from life, learn from your failures. Learn from your insecurities. Learn from your self-doubt. Don't just say, "I'm afraid to jump off an airplane." Mm-hmm. What makes you afraid of it? Study it. That's why I studied my mind, why I became so powerful in the mind, because I realized I was weak. So instead of running away from the mind, I dove into it and said, "What is making me weak?" Oh, this makes sense. I came from hell. I came from a place that beat me down, to nothing, which is why I'm afraid. All this makes sense. So systematically, one by one, I went back and met every single person in my mind, every situation. I went one-on-one with them again in my mind and said, okay, let's now revisit this. And that's how you do it. That's how it works.

If you want to know how David Goggins takes accountability for his life, check out the video right there next to me. I think you'll enjoy it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.