Stop Watching NETFLIX and Taking DAYS OFF! | David Goggins Success Motivation

Do you ever have a day where you just think, fuck it, I can't be asked to do anything. I'm not going for a run, I'm not stretching, I'm doing nothing. Every day. You say you have the thought, but you don't have the day. Every day. Do you ever let yourself have a day where you just watch Netflix? Never. I can't do it. I can't do it. There may be some days I get up with poopy pants and I'm like, you know what, man? Fuck this, man. Like, what am I training for? Yeah. I have no race on the docket. Why am I having this such a structured life? Why? And I'm like, you know what? I'm good. I'm done. I retire every day. I'm done with this shit. And I sit around, I say, okay. And then this is my thought process. So you want to You want to be normal. So you just want to be like everybody else that roams the world not knowing the power that's in them. Being fine with being mediocre. You want to go back to who you were, huh, David? I'm like, fuck that, man. And you have that conversation with yourself every day? Not every day. It's those bad days. Yeah. Who have no idea how talented they truly are. Now I'm talking about talent like some God-given ability. Sometimes you have to hone, you have to work on, and you have to harness yourself. And they just walk around on their phone clueless to how powerful they are. Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I make these videos because the thing that saved me as an entrepreneur was watching the stories of other successful entrepreneurs, and I learned from their advice, I learned from their motivation, and honestly, I have no idea where I would be if I didn't have those videos to inspire me. I still need them for myself today too, and I hope that they can inspire you as well. So today, let's get some incredible motivation from the one and only David Goggins. Enjoy. I believe that you have to build belief. Belief is like— there's an after-school special belief where the mom says, "Believe in yourself," and that's all great, but there's also a built belief. And the built belief is one where you are constantly— like, for me, I came from a bad place. How I build belief is through the the daunting tasks I put myself through. So that's proof positive that I can. So it correlates. And that's how this kid I once thought I was built belief by saying, hmm, I was in 3 Hell Weeks, I went to Ranger School, I tried out for Delta Selection. Undeniable stack of proof. That is proof. Whenever you think you can't, Confidence comes from the thing that you built. You must build belief. You must build confidence. It can't be like, hey, I'm gonna go knock that shit out. You gotta look over here and say, I can knock that shit out. It's belief and it's built on what you put into yourself. This allure that you have where it's with anything, any type of keynote from David Goggins, any type of video from David, podcast, what do you think it is? What do you think it is attracts people to your content? I think it's my take-it-or-leave-it kind of mentality where I don't really think about your feelings. I don't really care about what you think or what you think about me, or if you're soft, if you're weak, if you're hard, if you're an alpha, if whatever the hell you are. I just don't really care, and I'm going to say what I believe is going to get you better. It may make you pissed off at me in the interim, but in the long term, if you really think about what I'm saying, I'm saying things to you that I had to listen to and, you know, tell myself. And it's just sometimes hard truth sucks. What's your morning routine? Every morning without fail, the first thing I do is I run without fail. I haven't missed a day of running since 2016. Okay. So I get up, I do that. 4 days out of the week I go to the gym, and every single night for 5 and a half years I stretch out for at least 2 hours. That was a killer part of the book. Every night. That is— that's where I— so when you go so hard mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, you have to have time set aside to quiet and recover. Recovery is big. The mind, especially the mind and the body. This is my time. There's no phone calls, there's no emails. The world does not exist because I have to get ready for tomorrow. Get the body opened up. Why? Because as I won't get, you know, you went deep, you went deep in the book. It was awesome. But your body's getting tight. Yeah, you go hard, Tom. Yeah, a lot of people go hard. What happens is that stress starts to tighten up that psoas muscle, hip flexors, psoas, lower back. You got back problems all of a sudden, you have no idea why. It's all It's all tightness, man, because you're constantly charged and going hard. Your insecurities, your fears, pain, suffering, whenever, whenever your mind starts to feel uncomfortable, your brain tells you it's time to quit. We are done. Let's now go to our comfortable spot where we feel good about ourselves. So the 40% rule is just that we are leaving so much on the table because our mind has control over us. Versus us having control over our minds. Why is the book called Can't Hurt Me? There's a lot of reasons why. Um, is that, that the childhood, the upbringing from the dad? It's childhood and it's life. Uh-huh. Because basically the most important conversation you'll ever have is the one you have with yourself. You wake up with it, you walk around with it, you go to bed with it. Eventually you act upon it. If life is beating you down. Yeah. And it's hurting you and your internal dialogue is, man, life is kicking my ass. Yeah. You know what? When I was in SEAL training, when I was in Ranger School, when I was in all these, when I was growing up, I started realizing, man, if you have a can't hurt me mentality, if you're getting bullied like I got bullied, if you're struggling, if you're failing, if you're falling, whatever, falling out in life. If your mind is telling you, hey, we're in the fight, we're not going anywhere, you can't hurt me, no matter what you bring on me, no matter how bad life is, I'm going to be right here standing right in the middle of the ring, and the ring is the ring of life. Yeah. It's just a mantra that you say to yourself like, hey, you know what, whatever, man, bring it. Bring it. Become very dangerous when you have this idea that you can't be hurt or killed. That's right. Most of this generation quits the second they get talked to. You did this wrong, you did this wrong, or, or they get yelled at. It's so easy to, you know, I mean, to, to be great nowadays cuz everybody else is, most people are weak. This, this is a softened generation. So if you have any mental toughness, any, 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 as shit. 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 don't understand. By me running, I am calloused 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 and 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. You said I can be me. The second you said I can cuss and be me— and cussing, 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, 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, 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 so 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 this and you'll read about me years from now. If you could define happiness for you, what would that be? It's overcoming yourself. Yeah. At, at all costs, whatever that takes. Mm-hmm. To be at the point of your life where you don't care about being judged. You can be in a room of a million people and they all hate you and you walk in and you go like this because, not because you're angry at them, because you know yourself inside and out and you know that you've put yourself through hell. To be where you're at today. Mm-hmm. You've walked the walk, you've talked the talk, and you've walked the walk. And that's to me what it's all about. Mm-hmm. It's all about putting those boots on the ground and getting after it every day. And once you do that, you have a feeling about yourself that no one can ever take away or even understand. Yeah. It starts with the accountability mirror and it starts with you putting a Post-it note up on the accountability mirror. I am fat. I am this. I am that. And then put another Post-it note beside that you're fat on the ways how you're going to start to change that. And then every morning you go brush your teeth, wash your face, whatever you're going to do, look at that Post-it note and look at it and make sure it bothers you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that, dude. It has to bother you if If being fat does not bother you, you are never going to change. It has to bother you that you're not the smartest person in the room. Yeah, it has to bother you that you are lazy. If it doesn't bother you, there's nothing anyone can do for you. Be disappointed with yourself. That's right. That's okay. It's okay to be that way. There are a lot of people that are listening right now that either dealing with this very issue that we're talking about. When we finally left Buffalo, after all the physical and mental beatings that my dad handed out, we left Buffalo and I went to a, to me, even worse environment. I went to a very small town in Brazil, Indiana where there was about 5 Black families. And in 1995, the KKK marched in our 4th of July parade. So that being said, it paints Brazil, Indiana, that's the town I'm talking about, in a very bad light. And there were a lot of good people in this small town. So I wanna make that very clear. Sure, sure. But what happens is when you come from a very broken foundation, yeah. Your mind only sees hate and evil. Yeah. There was one time I was in my sophomore year, walked in my Spanish class to get my notebook, opened my notebook up, and inside the notebook someone drew a little character of me in a stick figure hanging from, you know, like that, like a noose. Yeah. Or like a hangman game. At this time in my life, I was a sophomore and I had about a 4th grade reading level 'cause I cheated all through school. Right. All through school I cheated because I realized I was gonna get put in a special school. Right. So I found a way to get by and this is how I got by. Right. So what I'm getting at is all this between my stepfather getting murdered or soon to be stepfather getting murdered, all these things compounded into the lowest of low self-esteem. Mm-hmm. So what started happening was I started lying. I became an amazing liar because I wanted people to like me. Yeah. When you come from a society like I did, I had zero self-esteem and I feared things. I had zero self-confidence and I was looking for anything I could that I could gravitate to. So it was lying. Yeah. But that's when I realized, and it was a long process, that without having self-esteem, you are done. Yeah. That's the number one thing you have to have in your life. So the one-second decision is, I had to live through that one-second decision several times during this race. So this race took me 100 and some hours. Okay? And this is what people don't get. For you to finish that race, even though I DNF'd, I still finished in the time. So there's a lot of pride in that. What I do in that one second, 'cause we all think about quitting when it's hard, but what you have to do in that one second is hard to process information during pain because that pain takes over and you can't think rationally. You're thinking about fight or flight, save yourself. That's not a rational thought. It's not a thought that's gonna get you through hard times. Most people fail that 1 second. So what happens, what I do in that 1 second is, and there's a bigger process to all this, but in that 1 second, I physically stayed in that water because if I get out of the water, I quit. So I physically stay in the water, but mentally I'm on the fucking beach with instructors and the instructors, it's cold outside. So they got these parkas on. They got their cup of Joe and they're warm because they've already been through it. So now it's your turn to go through it. So mentally, I get back with them. I'm still in the water physically, but mentally I'm back with them chilling. I got my parka on and now I'm thinking logically because I'm warm now. Mentally, I'm warm. I've taken that one second. Let's not quit yet, Goggins. Let's think about your options. Where are you going to end up if you quit this? Where are you going to go? What are you going to say to yourself? Because you know you're going to get warm the second you get out of this water. You could take a shower and you could be warm, and you could be— and in 5 days you could be out. So I start thinking logically. I calm my brain down because your brain just wants to get the fuck out, ring the bell, put your helmet down, get warm, and then you're really fucked. And these are the things you have to think about, the one-second decision. So that's what that's all about. It's about gaining control of your mind, putting things back in the proper perspective, and then saying, I really do want to be here and I'm going to have a bunch of these one seconds through this 130-hour journey. And I have to learn to control these because if I fail one of these one seconds, I will not be a SEAL. I will not be a doctor. I will not be a lawyer. I will not be whatever the fuck it is. So that's how important that one-second decision is. It's all about your mind takes control of you, you have to say, "Fuck you. I run this." And that's what that's all about. When you talk about the importance of having the right people in the foxhole with you, how do you know who the right people are? You know what? That was something that took me a lot of years to figure out. You know you have the right people in your foxhole when you're waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning, you're going to bed at midnight, and you're waking up at 3 and no one says, is this smart to do? You need some time off. You need to take a break. When I started hearing that, well, I know what I'm doing to myself. I was behind the power curve, man. When everybody starts off in first grade, I had them negative grades. I started off in the dungeon, man. I had to dig out of the damn grave to get to first grade. So now you're 20 years old Well, everybody graduated high school and all sorts, man. I gotta make time up. So while people think 24 hours is one day, for me it's 3, 4, 5 days. I gotta make up time. I'm behind. I gotta go to summer school in my mind. When who's with me realizes this gotta go to summer school in his mind, he's got to make up time. He needs 22 hours of the 24 And they just get it. He's trying to go somewhere. You are the right person for my foxhole. I don't want to hear no shit about resting. I can't rest right now. I don't want to hear no shit about what I'm doing to myself. I know what I'm doing to myself. Did you see how I came up? I gotta catch up now. And that's what life is about. Sometimes you are raised in a position where you are behind. We have to make that time up. I'm sorry, it may be inhumane, you may be unbalanced, it may not look right to you. I don't— it's the situation that life put me in. And I need people to say— when I don't want to get up at 3 in the morning, I need a motherfucker in my life that sees me go to bed at 12 and wakes me up at 3 saying, you need to get done. That's the foxhole. I don't need critiquing. I need pushing. I need pulling. I need anger. I need passion. I need drive. I need the man, those bad days. I don't need somebody in my ear saying, man, because then that's all a person needs is that support. Can go a lot of ways, man. I mean, $1,000 a month, 300 pounds, just, I can't do any of this stuff. Yeah, these people are better than me. Yeah. So first thing is, that's the first big problem right there. First big problem is that you have put a lot of people above you. Yeah. Put no one above you. Yeah. No one. But if you believe in something— Say that again. Say that again, because that's, you know, but, you know, but the man, the people that make more money, the people that are better looking, the ones that are on social media and they're so good at this. I put God above me. Besides that, there's no one better than me. Got it. You have to become an equal. Yeah. So this is how I look at it. If you're playing— and I talked about it at your conference— if you're playing Roger Federer, yeah, okay, before you get on the court with Roger Federer, he's the best of all time. Yeah. But you're also a professional tennis player, man. Yep. You're forgetting your own resume. Yep. So once you get on the court, let's say it's a Grand Slam, it's 5 sets. Hopefully, if you can go the distance with this guy. But before you even bounce the ball to serve it, you're down 2 sets. Because why? You look across and you're playing Roger Federer. But guess what? You hit a good shot on Roger Federer in the 3rd set. And you realize, I can play with this [MASKED]. But it's too late. You gave up 2 sets before you got on the court. You gotta stop giving up 2 [MASKED] sets before the game begins. And we do that already. My dad really helped create this. I'm not giving him credit. Yeah, like, oh, he was a great dad. Like, clap my hands for his ass. He helped create this because he was just that. He was a devil. You know, he was a guy that had to be very insecure, very beat down. Something had to happen to him when he was younger because the way he treated me, my brother, my mom was just horrible. So he would beat us. My mom, my brother, my me. And I'm not talking like, oh, you got in trouble, so let me give you a whipping. When he would— he was a drunk, okay? So whenever he woke up, man, he woke up drinking, went to bed drinking, and that's just how it was. And he'd get drunk, he just got violent. So my mom caught my dad cheating. We got home about 4 o'clock in the morning. I'm about 7, 8 years old, and I hear some ruckus outside my room as I'm getting ready laying in bed down for the night and my mom and dad are outside my room cause there's a staircase right there. And my dad is smacking the hell out of my mom and knocks her almost unconscious where she's kind of out of it. You know, she's kind of loopy. She falls down, he grabs her by her hair and drags her down the stairs by her hair. And so at this age, I'm sort of thinking, man, you know, what should I do, man? Like, you know, I'm scared, but then something in me saying, you gotta go. And do something. Oh my God. But I'm scared to death of this guy because he's been beating the shit out of me since I can remember. And I mean like laying me out for nothing. And I'm sitting there thinking, man, okay man, like, what am I gonna do? So my brother, he and I were very different. When my brother would see the fighting, he would go to his room and hide. I didn't do that. I always stuck around. So this time I stuck around, I decided to help her out. So I go on the stairs and I jump on his back and literally he tells my mom, you're raising a gangster. And she's like on the floor and he's almost smiling, almost like proud. But that smile went to a frown pretty quick and he beat the living hell out of me and he beat me literally from my neck down to my ankles, like black and blue. So the next morning, um, I was gonna go to school half the day. My mom woke up. And she pulled the covers back and what she saw was how bruised I was. And so when she pulled the covers back and saw how bruised I was, I'll never forget looking at her face because she used to write letters for me, you know, for me and my brother to miss PE because we were so bruised up from getting beaten. So, you know, hey, he's sick or whatever. And so, you know, she was lying a lot for my dad. So this particular day, She didn't write a letter, but when I laid in the bed and looked at my mom, she pulled the covers back. I'll never forget looking at her face and her face is tattooed in my brain. And why I say that, um, this past year I got the VFW Award for Americanism Award. And if you Google David Goggins VFW Award, I'm in front of 5,000 veterans and I'm getting this amazing award. John McCain got it and I'm up here thinking, man, I'm up here I'm getting this award, this is amazing. It's for giving back and also having a great military career. And I could give this 6-minute long speech. And I'm up there, man, I'm talking, and I'm thinking, I'm thinking people who helped me out. And I get to my mom, she's sitting backstage, you know, she's sitting right here on stage but behind me. And I haven't cried in 30 years. I can't even picture it. Haven't cried in 30 years, I just don't do that. And I turn around and say, and I wanna thank my mom for not picking me up when I was knocked down, but teaching me how to get up. 'Cause she never picked me up ever. And because her circumstances sucked. So anyway, I look back and I said that, and I got done, I didn't even get a chance to say it. I looked at her eyes and my head went right back to her face when she saw me bruised up. And that fucked me up. And for 58 seconds, look at the video, And you'll see me, my head's down and I'm sobbing. Wow. And I'm in front of 5,000 vets. And the guy who was, who was hosting the thing had to come up to me and like put his hand on my back. And I was just destroyed, overcome with emotion. And then 58 seconds go by and I get up and I deliver this speech. And so I tell you that because life, my life tattooed me. How does someone who's ordinary or listening or watching get more committed, achieve more success? The biggest thing you have to do is shut off technology. You have to go dark. What I mean by that is you have to be quiet in your mind, get away from people. We love being around people, we love talking, we love, we love parties, we love all that. It's okay to be alone. It's also okay to be unhappy. It's okay to be unhappy sometimes, man. It's okay to say, you know what, man, I'm, I'm fucked. So you gotta go to the truth first. Who are you? Get, get really accountable and say, okay, who am I? What's the truth about me? Get to that dark place in your mind. Figure out, it may take months, it may take years. Figure out your purpose. Figure out what you want to be in life. And then from there, okay. I have my purpose. It may take a long time. No one knows their purpose cuz it's too loud. Find your purpose. From there, all right, you gotta start planning. People love the planning phase cuz it's very comfortable. Then from the planning phase, you gotta go to execution. So the execution phase will be all hate because that's where the real work begins and that's when the failure happens and the failure and the failure. But you know, that's, that, that's kind of how you have to do it. Yeah. 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 gonna visit working out maybe an hour a day, 23 other hours of the day, you're not in it. Mm-hmm. 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 fucking 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 of an airplane? 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? When you get to where you want to go in life, when you finally get there, you finally reach that point and you're there and you're happy as hell, realize this. You're not there yet. Mm. When you get that feeling that you arrived, be afraid. Right. Be truly afraid because now you start to do this. Slowly die. Slowly die. Either you're getting better or you're getting worse. You're not staying the same. Yeah. So when you get to where you think the journey has ended, and you're sitting back and you're like, I arrived, I'm on Mount Everest. I climbed 29,029. Yeah. The best thing to do is fall back down that damn mountain as fast as you can and start climbing. Find the next climb. Find the next climb. Yeah. We all have these voices in our head. We like to not listen to 'em. The one that comforts us and keeps us nice and warm and cuddly and gives us cookies and milk at nighttime. We like that voice. That voice, the one we want to always hear, which is why people don't like to listen to me a lot. Some people do, some people don't. The only thing that changes you is being real. So basically, you know, I had to have the courage to go back in it because nothing was getting done. Mm-hmm. I kept on going to that nice cuddly voice in my head saying, you know what? You don't need to do this. That, that's too much work, man. You've earned this. You deserve this. And that mentality got me to 297 pounds, fat, outta shape, to me, a loser, to me making $1,000 a month and making a ton of mistakes because mistakes happen on the easy side of life. You take the easy road, the easy path. There's a lot of mistakes over there. The hard journey, you don't make too many mistakes over here cuz it's too hard. You don't want to repeat it. Mine is so powerful, and I didn't realize it. I went through 3 Hell Weeks, Ranger School, Delta Force selection, all this stuff. This incident I'm going to explain to you right now was where I realized we are only at 40% of what we are capable of. Here I am, right? I did do this race called Badwater 135. I Googled the 10 hardest races in the world. What came up? Crazy race in Death Valley, summertime, 135 miles. I knew nothing about ultra running. I thought you would like, you know, camp out, run 20 miles, then one day, then run 20 miles again until you got 135 miles. I had no idea what I was doing. Called the race director up. He's like, hey, have you run 100 miles? I was like, what, in a week or what? What are you talking about? He's like, no, in 24 hours or less. I said, no. He goes, you got to qualify to get in this race. You have to run 100 miles in 24 hours or less. He was trying to call my bluff. I call him up on a Wednesday. He goes, hey, there's a race in San Diego on Saturday where it's a 24-hour race where you run around, you know, a track, a 1-mile track for 24 hours. And if you get 100 miles, I will consider you in my race. It really helps to be smart, people, and I was not smart in this situation. I thought I did the math, it's about a 14-something-minute mile, I can do that. Anyway, I show up on Saturday with the blue lawn chair, Ritz crackers, Mild Plex, and my ex-wife, and every mile I'm going to see her I'm gonna grab some Ritz crackers and some Myoplex. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but it's bliss. That whole ignorance is bliss thing. So I get to 70 miles pretty damn fast. I get to 70 miles in like 12, 13 hours. What do you think happens to your body when you haven't trained for that kind of mileage? A lot of bad things. But I thought I was in good shape. It was amazing. So I hadn't gone to the bathroom at all. I sit down— big mistake— I sit down in this blue lawn chair. I sit down looking at my ex-wife. I'm seeing like 3 or 4 of her. I'm like, oh, this is not good. So I'm trying to play it off because I know where I'm about to go. So I'm sitting there And when you haven't gone to the bathroom, you're dehydrated, your nutrition's all jacked up, you sit down, you got to go to the bathroom. Now I'm sitting there and I'm all jacked up and I'm like, okay, how in the world am I going to— I got 30 miles to go. I should quit, but I didn't. What I started doing through this whole process was I started to study myself in the dark times. So instead of just quitting real fast, I said, no, I'm going to quit, but not right now. So I sat back for a second and I said, let me get some water, let me hydrate, let me clean myself up a little, let me get some nutrition. I wasn't dizzy, so okay. My feet are all messed up. Let me see if I can walk. I'm gonna walk 1 mile, then I'll go home. That'll be a great accomplishment for me, 71 miles. So I took this massive thing and I started breaking it down into small chunks. And as I started breaking it down into small chunks, I started realizing maybe I'll walk 1 more mile. But at the pace I was walking, I wasn't going to make the time. So this is when I realized the whole 40% rule. Those of you who worry, you know, Red can't hurt me, you understand it. Basically, the 40% rule is when we have a governor on our brains, like a governor on a car. A car may say 130, but if you put a governor on a car, it can only go 101. We do the same thing to our brains. I was born with limited horizons. Born on the other side of the tracks. I didn't think I could be anybody. So my governor was myself. So once you take that governor off, you have limitless horizons. So here I am now, sitting in this chair, walked 75, I'm at 80 miles, but I'm not committed to time. Most amazing thing happens. The brain, the mind, the soul, the spirit, It all connected. It's never happened before like this in my entire life. I ran the next 19 miles. I ran about 10-minute mile. I finished 101 miles in 19 hours and 6 minutes. I'm going to save you how the story ends because it ends real foul. It ends in a tub with me peeing Coca-Cola out of myself. It was blood, and it was the best feeling I had in my entire life. I'm not sadistic, but when you push yourself to that level and accomplish something you thought was impossible, what happens to your body and mind is something I can't really even explain. When I left, I was young. I had a young man's, a young kid's point of view on my father. So when I was 22, At 300 pounds, I went back to see my dad cuz I wanted to make sure that what I saw at 8 is the same vision cuz it's my father. I don't want to not talk to my father no matter what he did, no matter what I saw, but was it through a young kid's eyes? Mm-hmm. So at 22, I went back and I was able to examine him. At a, as a, as a man, as a fragile man that I was. Sure. But I was able to examine him and through this process, by this, so by this point in my life, I was examining myself and realizing I have a whole mess of problems. Mm-hmm. Big time. Some were from him, some were from people that bullied me. A lot were from me. And in knowing how messed up I was, I was able to examine everybody around me. I examined him and I examined him and know, my God, the insecurities that you must have, the problems that you must have inside of you. I don't want to have those. I come from my father. I have what he has. Mm-hmm. And I didn't want to be him. Why he made fun of me, my brother, why he beat the hell out of me, my brother, my mom. It comes from a dark place, an insecure, dark, dark place. Why he womanized, why he sold prostitutes, why he ran pro— all this stuff he did. A good human being doesn't need to do that. A fulfilled human being doesn't need to break anyone down. All they do is want to build you up. So anybody you meet that calls you outta your name, that bullies you, that messes you up, that, that makes you feel not lifted, they are dealing with something deep rooted. Yeah. You have to have a tough tone with some people to help them out. There's a difference. You have to be hard. I'm hard on people, but it comes from a good place. Yeah. The biggest lesson he taught me was how not to be. And that's why I had to fix what I was, because insecurities make everybody around you feel like hell. And that's the one thing I did not want anyone to feel like. That's why I judge no one. Tons of whites have called me nigger. I've been— tons of people have hurt me. I judge no one cuz I know where it comes from. Mm-hmm. I know you. I was once you. That's why now the place I'm at, you get a get out of jail free card. You need to help yourself. Mm-hmm. You ain't bullying me, man. Right. You're fine. You're— I'm good. Whatever you throw at you, I'm good. You're like, I know what's wrong with you. I was once you, right? So I started to examine people, examine myself, examine my darkness. Realizing how I cannot be, but I got it from examining him. Mm-hmm. Saying, I cannot be that. You're gonna find peace from going to war with yourself. Cause we all got, people look at me, every, the reason why my story resonates with people, because I don't hide. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I'll tell you exactly who the fuck I am. I will admit to it. People are great at hiding. Mm-hmm. So they want to just find peace. No, you gotta, you gotta take your shit, fix whatever's fucked up. Up in you. Don't just shove it under the rug. Fix it, and then you'll find some peace later. I work with a guy who's in a business like this for 5 years. I'm not gonna mention his name. Yeah, he called me up 5 years ago and said, I want you to work with me. Yeah, his job, a big day for them was if you had 5 meetings and 40 calls. $40, that was like, according to their big business plan, that was a day. Yeah, he said, I want to make more money. "All this shit is just bugging me down." I said, "This is your fucking day? 5 meetings and 40 fucking calls a day?" Do you start at 10 and end at 4? And this company you work for says that this is a great day? This is what we want? I had this guy, no shit, one day he made 1,000 cold calls and had 7 fucking meetings. So his new norm, which is now the company, like how did you become, he made $100,000, went to making, $600,000 in 3 years. Yeah, that's, that's the jump he had just because his mindset changed. Because the company put this— this is what is a good day. A good day is 40 calls, 5 meetings. I said, you're comparing yourself with mediocre people. Bingo, bingo. Do not run with mediocre people. I'm going to tell you how to beat these mediocre people. This is your new 300 dials and 8 fucking meetings. Yeah. And his whole world changed. Now 300, just another day. Yeah. What I'm most impressed with is training the brain. Would you say to those of us that are listening and watching today that every time you would get through a day of Hell Week or just a day of training, whatever it was, that the mind does almost like a muscle, the voice does change and you can train the negative voice? The mind, as you know, is not a muscle, but it almost is. Yeah. It really is. If you stop going to the gym, right, your muscles will atrophy. Yeah. If you stop training your brain, same thing will happen. So I learned to callous over. I did 4,030 pull-ups in 17 hours to break the Guinness Book of World Records. Your hands become very calloused. Calluses protect your hands. What I learned to do is through mental hardening is callous my mind. I had a victim's mentality. I learned to callous my mind over the victim's mentality. And you have to be willing to put yourself in very difficult situations at all times to be able to do that. So my big takeaway of life is if you're constantly taking the easy way out, you're never gonna callous your mind. I was at MIT. They called a person like me to MIT to speak to some of the biggest head guys on the planet. Oh yeah, these are brains. Oh, brains. So I was on this panel and I talk about it in my introduction of my book and all these brainiacs were there and they called me in. Like you say, I didn't go to college for this, but they're all theorists. I'm a practitioner. That's why I asked you. Absolutely. That's the difference. And so they're all sitting there, all these great smart minds from MIT are asking these brilliant guys questions. I ain't say a word. I'm like, I'm intimidated. But I know that half of what they're saying is wrong. Because what these theorists did, even though they're very smart, what these theorists did was they took a poll on normal people. And this is what you get. Of course. This is what we cannot do. So theorists love telling you what we cannot do. This is what we can do. Right. So one person in the crowd asked me a question, why aren't you saying anything? I said, pretty much 'cause I disagree with almost everything up here on this panel, 'cause I'm living proof that everything that they're pretty much saying is not true. That's right. 'Cause you were an average person. I was a below, below, sure, sure, sure, sure. Below average person. I was a chameleon living in life who could barely get by. So I know that they were taking the normal mindset of people. They weren't talking about the 1%ers, the people who want it like there's no tomorrow. And so that's what I started realizing was we have theorists and we have practitioners. So what's in my book is from going into the, to the dungeon. And when you're in those points where you want to quit and not quitting and seeing how the mind starts to operate in those moments of fear, anxiety, self-doubt, insecurities. And that's where you learn to fix it. Yeah. You don't fix it in 72-degree weather, right? Drinking a milkshake, watching TV. You fix it by going into the environment. The problem that most of us have is we think that we're all alone. We think that we're the only ones going through all this stuff. I thought it. Most of us think that if you're fat, which I was fat for a while, you think you're the only fat person in the world. Your, your vision becomes very narrowed. And what happened to me was all I did was I peeled back. I peeled back and I was able to get on top of a mountaintop in my head. And when you're high on that mountain, you have a great— you have a great vantage point. And I was able to look down at the world, and we are— all of us are jacked up. Some of us hide it better than others, but we're all jacked up. And once you realize that You know, you gotta come out of your shell. You gotta accept who you are. You gotta accept the demons that life gave you, that maybe you gave you, whoever gave them to you. You got to accept that. You gotta be able to look them in the mirror, look them in the eyes, say, okay, I'm gonna start fixing these things. But if you think that you're by yourself, the reality of your life becomes very, very horrible. And you're not. We are all jacked up. And once you realize that, man, you just It's like whatever, you know, you don't even look at the crowd anymore. You look at your own race, you do your own race, you do your own thing, and you finally find out who you're supposed to be in this life. What does a morning look like for you at the moment? Have you got a routine of some kind? Yes, I run every single morning. So that's how you— up when you're waking up? I'm up about 5, 5:30. So every morning starts with a run, and that's because that's the one thing I hate to do more than anything in the So that's like my cup of coffee. And I'm all about armoring yourself. So the second you leave your house and the second you open your phone, you are now letting in poison and cancer. So I make sure a lot of things you can't avoid. So as I get up, I start to armor plate my mind and body like a person's going to war. You put You put your body armor on. That's what I'm doing on that run. I'm waking up and I'm giving myself all this armor. So when I come out in the world, look at that phone, I'm ready. I'm not waking up late. I'm not rushing around. I'm not disorganized. 'Cause I know I'm gonna get hit in the fucking mouth. There's a, there's an art to getting hit in the fucking mouth. And that is why these things are important. You have to wake up and, You have to give yourself belief. You have to give yourself confidence. So that it starts with that run. Anybody, not just Navy SEALs, but anybody that can accomplish anything that is hard. Mm-hmm. The only separator is, is that they really want to be there. Mm-hmm. There's some people that get inspired. Mm-hmm. And that inspiration moves them to try to do something, but that inspiration is very high right now in this nice environment. We're in a nice environment. The ocean's out there. I'm talking to you. If I want to go to the refrigerator and get something to drink, eat, I can. I watch a movie about some badasses, you're inspired. But the second you're not in this environment and you're actually doing what inspired you, that suck factor is now real. You can't just get off your couch and get a shake or get a box of donuts or turn the TV. You're now there. And only those people who have been there a million times in their minds and have lived in that water and have suffered a million times and realize my legs may break, my knee may break, my bones will hurt, I will be the coldest I I've been in my life, I will be miserable and accept that. Because what happens is when you get in a horrible situation in life, your mind— I call it my one-second decision. When you get in a horrible situation in life, your mind immediately says, get the fuck out of here. Everybody does, even if you want to be there. But it starts to have all these different questions in your mind in that one second. It says, okay, why are you here? Why are you doing this? Why this? Why that? And then you start to say to yourself, if you don't want to be there that bad, I have a beautiful wife at home, man. Why the fuck am I doing this, man? Like, this is stupid. This is going to get these guys injured. Like, they're going to pay for this for the rest of their lives. I'm not going to break my body up to do this. Your mind starts to say, yeah, this is stupid. But if you have, if you are already knowing that this is going to happen to you, you have all the answers to these questions. That your mind starts to give you when you're in suffer mode. Let's say for shits and giggles, I'm training for a 100-mile race. Yeah, let's say just for shits and giggles, I'm training for a 100-mile race, right? Okay, good. So let's say I'm training for a 100-mile race and I get to mile 50. Yeah, and I feel like shit. And like everybody else, my mind gets soft. Why? Because I'm human. I'm not some damn, you know, hybrid creature that was formed from the heavens above. No, not human. I suffer. I don't like it. I'm uncomfortable. I don't like it. So my mind starts to get weak and we start to forget about how badass we are. I call that the cookie jar, but it's not about the cookie jar right now. This is about self-talk. But the cookie jar kind of goes to self-talk too. It's a piece of it. So basically what I do here is you have to make sure that your mind doesn't becomes spastic. When it's suffering, when it's in pain, all it wants to do is find the easy way out, which is usually quit. If you quit, the pain goes away immediately. Yeah. You gotta give yourself enough energy and fuel in your mind to stay just a little bit longer so you can talk yourself into staying for the whole thing. Yeah. And this is how it works. Most of us never start anything cold. If you're gonna go to college, you gotta study your ass off. If you want to run a 100-mile race, a marathon, if you want to go be Mr. Olympia, if you want to go be a scientist, a doctor— Be one of the best salespeople on the planet. You got to work. You got to work. But this is what you do. You got to build up to that. But what happens is, in that moment when we need self-talk, when we're failing and we're in our worst spot possible, we forget the back end. Yeah. Oh, my fault, the front end. All the buildup to where we're at today. We forget how much work we put in. So for me, I'm at mile 50. Say that one more time. Say that one more time. So I'm in the middle of it. Right. I'm making my calls. I hate it. You're at mile 50. That's right. You hate it. Your mind's getting, you know, wiggly on you. I just want to get out of here. Yeah. We forget that we put years. Yeah. Years, maybe not into making these dials, but to getting where you're at today. To become this person. To become this person. Person to be in a position to make this money or whatever the fuck you want to make, whatever you want to do in your life. Yeah. We forget that. We forget that journey on what it took for us to get in this moment to make the right decision. Yeah. So that's my self-talk is this. Okay, I'm gonna get the fuck outta here, man. I'm done. Then I remember this. You ran 2,000 miles training to be in this moment right now. We forget that. Yep. We forget the 3 o'clock in the morning runs or getting up early for work or whatever you're doing. We forget all that. In that moment of suffering, I remind myself, yeah, I only have 50 more miles. I put in 6 months of training. You did 67,000, 67,000 pulls. That's right. 30, right? Exactly. This is no big deal. We forget all of that. Yeah. So what I do, my self-talk is basically going back down memory lane. Yeah. Of all those fucking days I ran in the fucking rain or I had to fucking study real late at night and I didn't want to do it, but I did it to get here. Yeah. That's the hook. That is the hook. That's the hook. I wanted to get here. Yeah. Now you're here and now you want to fucking quit? Yeah. So you got to be mindful, but just think about it. If you haven't put in any hard work, to reflect on, you're fucked. Yeah. So there is no self. Because you got nothing to pull back on. It's just a lie. Nothing to say, hey, you've done this before. That's right. Or you've done something like this before. That's right. All this, all this, like, people want to be all positive, all this positive talk, it doesn't work if it's a lie. Like, if you didn't study for your big exam and you go into it saying, I'm going to pass it. Yeah. No, you're not. Yeah. You're going to fucking fail it. Yeah, that self-talk is not going to work. Self-talk without real work is just a lie. Yeah. So my self-talk is me reminiscing back on the struggle to get to this moment, and that tells me we're not quitting today. Yeah, not today. Yeah, yeah. And you state that when you're living in hell, the only way to find your way out is to confront the devil himself. You know, who was that devil for you? It took several years for me to figure out Who the devil was, and the devil was my father. The devil was my father. But what I didn't put and never finished was the devil really was me. So what happened was I put all this blame, and trust me, my father and a lot of people had to do with my upbringing on how it was. But like I put in that book, no one's going to come back and say, hey man, I apologize. Maybe someone does. Very few people will. So at the end of the day, when all things are said and done with, while my dad was the devil, and I believed that for a long time, I had to confront him. And I confronted the devil— so what I thought was the devil— I realized that I was the true devil. I was the one holding me back. I was the one looking for the scapegoat. And, you know, I was the one looking for all these ways to say, it's okay, David, you're a loser, you're a born loser, so it's okay. And I was hoping my dad was going to give me that confirmation, and he was a loser himself. But at the end of the day, when I left there, I realized, well, man, it's on me. My dad's fucked up, my mom's fucked up, the people around me are fucked up. They're not going to save you. You gotta save yourself, my friend. So that's when all that reality hit me when I went to Buffalo to see my dad and I drive home. I was like, man, this rest of your life is going to suck. It is going to suck not because you're going to be a loser, but because you're going to finally start to win. And winning is not easy, my friend. I was 300 pounds twice in my life. So every day I have my shoes laid out because I hate running. People don't believe it. I hate it. So this is what happens. Every day I wake up out of my fucking bed and there's my shoes, my shirt, my shorts, depending on the weather. There's some days I fucking wake up and I just look at them for hours. And then I start walking around the fucking house. House. And I said, I ain't fucking running today. I'm not doing shit today. Nothing. I don't have to. That's when I think, I got 2.3 million followers on Instagram. You have an obligation, not to yourself, but to everybody out there that is touched by what you do as a human being. While nobody knows what I'm doing, no one is is videoing me. I am a virtual trainer mentally because there's a lot of people out there saying, man, David Goggins is fucking after today. And if I wake up one morning and don't fucking do that, I go back to that David Goggins who lied about being who he wanted to be. So my thing that keeps me going every day is my mission in life. While I did not choose it, I'm an introvert and I fucking hate what we're doing even right now, is to always stay the fucking course because you know exactly what it is to not man up. I've done that too many times in my life. So that's what keeps me going. 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 airplanes, 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 military. 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 SEAL, like a SEAL, your mentality changes. I may not live. You gotta accept that. And that's the mentality you have. I wanted to be an expert in the mind, a mental toughness guy, beyond mental toughness. The only way to do that in my eyes is to put yourself in hell. Mm-hmm. Put in hell repeatedly, repeatedly put yourself in hell and study how you process it. And that's how I was able to come up with all these different ways, all these different tools to, to slow the mind down in hell. Mm-hmm. Because the mind just speeds up. The mind wants to get out of the painful situation, the suffering. It can't, it can't process it. So that's what I realized by going through all these different processes of being in hell weeks. You know, it's just that. I love that, man. How the mind processes in hell. Were you ever scared that you would lose the processing ability to be able to coach yourself through it? Were you ever scared when you were there? I was, uh, there's some times where the mind gets overwhelmed and you cannot slow it down. But by these, these certain tools I developed, By not allowing your mind to get away from the moment. You cannot— you have to think about the exact moment that you're in. But I saw when I was younger, the moment became too big. It became too big. I spazzed out and I would quit. But now I don't think about even like an hour from now I'll be eating. I don't even go there because then your mind— yeah, no, we embraces because now there's— you have to be a leader in this moment. It's not about you just getting through it. I had 6 guys, I had 5 guys, and 6 including me in my boat crew. Now I was the boat crew leader. So now another trick is this: if you don't think about yourself, there's no pain, which can also lead to pain later on in your life. But in these moments when you're struggling, if you are a true leader, leader and you're worried about your men or women beside you, your mind doesn't care how cold you are anymore. Your mind's only worried about taking care of the men and women beside you. So I started realizing, man, if I take care of these cats to my left and my right in the worst moments, my mind is no longer thinking about, you're miserable, David Goggins, get the hell out of here. Think about, how was John? How was Andy? How was Sam? How was Pete? How, hey, how you guys doing? You're not thinking about me. So there's so many things you can do to get outside your own head. Mm-hmm. To then allow your body to just be like, hey, we're just a machine. But you have to let your mind be able to process all these different tactics to do that. Take a different vantage point in life. Mm-hmm. When you are in the hell, you can't see the beauty of being in it when you're in it. Get on top of that mountaintop in your mind. Get on top of that mountaintop and look down and what you're doing, you can see a whole different world. And that world is beautiful, but you gotta get a different vantage point in this, in the suck. Don't be in it spiritually. Get out of it. Get that soul. Look down on what you're doing. Be amazed by the process of where you're at now and where you came from. 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, that of of that person who's waking up at 3:30 in the morning and say, "Hey, put your shit 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 watch the game." We like that. We love that feeling. Why? 'Cause you understand, man, we're good, bro. We don't want that like this. "Hey, man, no, bro, get your shit 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? 'Cause once you hit the top of the fucking 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 gotta 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 bullshit. I listen to them like this, man. What's wrong, man? I'm tired, dude. Why are you tired? Because tomorrow I got to do the shit 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 cuz that's where you find yourself. You don't find yourself in over here. You find yourself on the other end, like, 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. I'll never forget when I was younger and I lived in a $7 a month place and everything was jacked up. I had a pair of jeans and every I'll never forget this as long as I live. You know, first day of school, people go school shopping, right? Week out, 2 weeks out, maybe a month out. We didn't have any money to do that. So I had this pair of jeans that the inside of the pocket was green. The inside of the pocket was green. I wore them almost every fucking day. So what I did for the next year of school was I cut that pocket out so the green would show, so it looked like a new pair of jeans. All I wanted was money. All I wanted was a nice car, was a nice home. The second I got the money to do it, I realized it's bullshit. That's why I don't own a car, I don't own a place, nothing. What I realized is all I wanted in my life was look at that accountability mirror and be proud of. And everything else went away. While you need money to be successful, you need money to live, you need money— money does buy a form of happiness because without it you're miserable. But once I realized it doesn't mean— it doesn't mean for me. What makes you happy? Achievement. Reaching goals, accomplishing things that I thought were impossible to accomplish. Because while I don't smile all the time, there's this feeling inside of me that no one— very few people have. Very few people have. Because when you come from where I came from, nothing, and you make something out of nothing, the feeling stays with you. All day long, and it allows you to be who you want to be in front of anybody. My mom didn't know how bad my grades were. She never saw one report card. I hid everything from— and she didn't even ask. She was so bogged down with life. And so I got away with a lot of shit because her mind was occupied. So it made me honestly a weaker person. So I scammed life. My mom helped me scam life for for a while. But this time I couldn't scam life. I went the second time, took the ASVAB test, failed it again. And a week later she got a letter in the mail from my high school. And I'm a junior in high school, and then later says pretty much, your son's gonna flunk out, he's missed 25% of school. Because she was always gone, so I never went to school. He's gonna miss school, and so he's gonna flunk out. So I was exposed once again. My mom goes, well, she read the letter to me, she put my bed And her best advice was, guess what? You're gonna flunk outta school. That was it, end of conversation. So this is when I developed my accountability mirror. And this is awesome. I, I look in the mirror and at this time I didn't want to be the black kid in school. There's like 5 or 6 of us in school outta like 1,700 kids, something like that. And I made up a character. To kind of like draw attention from color. Okay. And so what I did was I started to design haircuts, and one haircut I had was the old man, and I shaved my head up here just like this. You did this? I did this, and I would keep the hair on the side like old man has. And one time I shaved my whole head and had reverse part, so I had hair up here and it kind of zigzagged. So I did things to to be this cool, crazy, kind of like creative kid. You know, like crisscross came out this time, so I had my pants sagging but backwards. So my back pockets were here. I had toothbrushes. I was crazy, man. But I was a crazy cool kid in school. So I look in the mirror, I see this letter, I'm fucked up. And I'm like, you know what, man? No one's coming to help me. I remember back to what my principal said, 'cause I went to the principal when they wrote that shit on my car and in my notebook. And the best advice he can give me, God help his soul, was this: they're ignorant. They spell nigger, Niger. And so that's it. But honestly, I talked to the guy as I wrote my book, and I have nothing wrong with Principal Freeman. He actually— I actually interviewed him for the book and he was happy to interview. He was a good man. What the fuck you could tell some black kid? You're a white guy in white society. We could tell me. So I started talking to myself this way in this mirror. Hmm. What the fuck is Principal Freeman? At that time, like, this is the best you can do, Principal Freeman? Hmm. That was my mind then. But in this mirror, it wasn't my mom, it wasn't Principal Freeman, it wasn't my dad. It was me. Because when nobody coming back to help David Goggins, that was my mindset now. And so with my non-spelling ass, I started getting these sticky notes. Wow. And writing, you're fucked up. And my mom wakes up like, what? What is wrong with you? I go, man, I'm— I have to change because I can't stay here. I can't. I look at myself in the mirror and I was defeated. I go, look at myself. I'm like, who am I? So I'm defeated in this mirror. I'm like, okay, I'm changing. On the other side of that extreme place that I call suffering, call whatever you want, there's a whole nother world that people have not even examined. But you have to go to that extreme place to examine it. We want to stay here in this comfortable place. Once you're willing to push yourself to that extreme place, it's like a whole nother universe. It's almost like, like you're an astronaut and you've examined something like up in outer space. Mm-hmm. No, it's always been there, but you have to be going through all the muck and all the shit to examine it. You realize, wow, God, through all this crap, there's a whole nother, whole nother universe over here in my mind. Yeah. Yeah. Whole nother universe. We have a theorist and we have a practitioner. The theorist is a person that's gonna sit back and read books from a library that somebody else wrote. They become real smart about what someone else wrote. Okay. A practitioner is a man, is me. I put myself in hell, lived in it for a long time, and figured out how the human mind works while being, while suffering, while in pain, while in misery. And that's how I wrote my book. Yeah. I'm gonna tell you exactly what your mind is thinking. Most of us don't stay in hell long enough to write the book. Yeah. I stayed in long enough to write it and finish the book. We all have a voice in our head. Some of us are very spiritual, some of us are not, but we all have this voice saying, you're doing, this is wrong, don't do that. The more you don't listen to that voice, The further that voice gets away from your head— some people call it the Holy Spirit, some people call it God, some monks, whatever, whatever you call it, it's there. We all have it. It's the right or wrong voice. But the more we don't listen to it, the more that voice goes away. The only voice you hear is yourself. We all— when the only voice you hear is yourself, you're wrong. There's a voice that guides you through life, and sometimes this guy you you in a direction that you don't want to go, that's usually the right place to go. It's that uncomfortable place. So that voice is always talking to me, but we don't listen to it. I listen to it. And when I start getting anxious, nervous, like I've done— we all know when we've done too much because it's telling us, I'm getting tired, I'm wearing down. But we, we go, we go, we go. I start talking to my fiancée say, hey, I'm doing too much. You start now, like, like I did in Hell Week, like I do all the time. The one-second decision is that decision when your mind starts to get so amped up, whenever you can't hear yourself think, you gotta slow down. Whenever you're living off a schedule, every day's a schedule, every day's a schedule, you have no time for yourself. When you start— and we all know it— I don't have time for this anymore, I have time for that anymore. That's when your mind and your body is saying, think about that. I'm neglecting my fiancée. I'm neglecting my disciplines of life. I'm neglecting my reading, my learning, my workouts, my diet. You start neglecting all of that. You neglect one of them. You can neglect all of them a long time. It's going to haunt you. When you start seeing that, my God, I haven't eaten right in a long time. Haven't been sleeping right in a long time. It can only be one of those things to take you off. So I'm, I'm, I'm very aware of my eating, my sleeping, my, my, my disciplines of life. And when I started to get too far away from them, it's a hard stop. Mm-hmm. Because what made me, me are the self, not just disciplines, the self-disciplines of life. Mm-hmm. And those those are always in front of you if you have any. They're always in front of you. So that's, so that's my hard stop. What got you up out of the chair? Honestly, I create this thing called the cookie jar. As I went through my suffering in life to become who I was, and the cookie jar was every time I failed everything so many times in my life, and failure, and I would succeed, I would fail, and I would succeed. I had to figure out how to succeed through failure, and I put a bunch of cookies in the cookie jar. The cookie jars things, when I start to get the woe is me mentality, which we all still get even though, even though you could be very successful, I reach in and I say, oh, this is my childhood and this is what I did to overcome that. Because a lot of times when you're in hell, you forget how great you really are because at that moment you're suffering. So you don't, you don't think about the great things that you've done. I take time to really calm my brain down when it's stressed out and remember where I came from and say, okay, no, we can do this. We can do this through a calm, patient mind. Figuring out how to do it. So I figured out how to do it, how to get salt, electrolytes, get some food, get some hydration back in me, get my blood pressure to the point where I could stand up. That was the first mission. I started with, uh, very small goals, you know. It wasn't like I went out there and— well, I started out real big, and I realized that the big goals were just crushing me, you know, because they weren't happening fast enough. And I had to start making big things very small, and I had to take a lot of pride and a lot of, uh, self, a lot of satisfaction from the fact that, you know, I had to lose 106 pounds in like less than 3 months. Wow. Which was an impossible task for anybody to do. So instead of looking at 106 pounds, man, I was happy to lose a pound. I was happy to run a quarter mile because you know how it is as a powerlifter, man, you're not running anywhere. Yeah, I mean, for me, when I was a powerlifter, man, I was so crazy about calorie content and losing calories that I hated even walking to the refrigerator. You know, I didn't wanna lose any calories 'cause I knew losing calories meant losing strength. So I was a freak about all that stuff, man. So I had to totally flip my mindset about all that stuff and just find very small goals and start achieving them, being proud of myself through those small goals that I accomplished. And what's your purpose right now? My purpose right now is to continue I used to have a wash rag when I did this. And you know how you take a shower, you have a wash rag and a cloth and you, uh, you're sitting there and you're just lathering up. And before you hang your rag up, you want to get all the water to come on it and, you know, get it all, all that, you know, all the suds out of it. You wanna wring it out and you wanna hang it up. So my big thing is when I live my life, I wanna make sure that when I'm dead and gone that I wring that wash rag out. And that wash rag is my soul. And I also believe that we're going to end up one day meeting the maker, if you believe in one. And I believe that maker knows everything about you, everything about you. Knows I was going to be here and talking to you, knows everything. But you also have a choice to make. You have a choice to make. We have choices. And the one thing that scares me to death in my life is getting to heaven and not being where I'm supposed to be. And I believe that God has a chart and he looks at the chart and he puts it in front of you when you get to heaven. He says, hey, this is what you're supposed to be. And one of my biggest fears in life was to see that chart and not have every block checked off. Mm-hmm. You know, I wanna make sure that I'm constantly pursuing whatever it is I'm pursuing just to be the best. I con— just constantly grinding myself into a fine powder. Mm-hmm. You know, and, but doing it in a smart way. Like I talked about, you can constantly grind yourself into a point where you're just sick. There's a happy medium of grinding. So that's my purpose now, to continue to push myself so others can see what is possible. I think we need to rethink how we frame failure. Like, I don't even like that word. You know what I mean? Because it implies such a negative outcome or perspective. Like, there should be a different word for it, and then we wouldn't be so caught up in it. You know what I mean? What you said is so true. That word doesn't bother me because I look at it like you are trying to say it. Failure is just a word. For me, failure was me having more information on how to succeed. That's all failure became to me. So I failed so much. Pull-up records, running events, had to quit this, BUD/S, Rangers, all this crap I had to go back through. All that was was, oh, I failed because of these reasons here. Go back to the drawing board, figure out the right equation, put it together, go back, fail again. Oh, but I got more information. So everything I was afraid of, I made sure to meet it right in the face and overcome it. A lot of people are listening to this right now, and a lot of people probably feel like crap about themselves. What is something that you're able to share with people that can help flip a switch? Or is there anything, you know, or do they just need to come to their own realization? They need to hit bottom, they need to go through some first in order to get there. Like, what are your thoughts on that? Well, you know what's funny, man, is that I'm not speaking for every big guy by any means, but I was once the big man, and I, and I realized a lot of us big guys, man, we got some serious demons. You know, I hung around big guys and we all, we all, you know, we'd all break down and we started talking about our personal lives and how we all are. And, you know, hey, why don't you become big, man? We all had almost a similar story of insecurities. Yeah. And, you know, walking around in the airport looking like a, a gargantuan man, people look at you differently. You get a little more self-esteem. So I'm gonna be talking to a few of us out there when I say this, man. The biggest thing in life that you have to do is you have to be proud of yourself. You have to start developing that personal self-esteem, and it has to be something that It's an internal thing and it has to come from a lot of hard work and dedication. And you really have to— I call it like, like right now I see your headphones on your head. I walk around life with so-called headphones on my head, man. I don't really wear them, obviously, but I just have these earmuffs on that I silence out the noise, I silence out the judgment. I silence out the self-doubt. I silence out every— all the naysayers. And, you know, those people get in our head and then we start getting in our head. And the most important conversation we'll ever have is when we have it ourselves. And like you were saying to yourself, man, I'm dumb, I'm this, I'm that. I was the same way. So if that's what you're constantly repeating to yourself in that internal conversation, man, that's who you're going to be. And, uh, my, my biggest thing for these people who are out here is honestly, man, you have to start callusing over that victim's mentality. You have to start building this mental armor that no matter what anybody says, that you can be in a room full of a million people and all million can be like against you and calling you names and whatever, and you like this, you know what, Roger that, you go fuck yourself, man, because I know exactly where I'm going. I know exactly what I'm doing. And that's the kind of self-esteem you have to build in yourself, man, in this kind of society today, because it's tough. It's tough out here nowadays. I started this crazy stretch routine and I literally have healed myself through the discipline I had. And what people won't believe is I got to a point where I stressed out for 8 to 12 hours a day. So essentially, like most of your waking hours when you're not working out, stretching. Yeah. And it went from that to 6 hours a day, then from 6 hours a day to 4 hours a day, the more it opened up. So the hips— and what, is there like a specific routine of stretches that you would go through, or— I would sit and stretch a whole big routine, a whole mess of like opening up your abductors, because your abductors are attached to your hips, your hip flexors, your everything is attached at this region here, your, your midsection, your hips. And my hips got so tight that I couldn't even squat down. I had so much back pain. So that's why— another reason why I started running. Running, you stay upright. I couldn't squat anymore. I couldn't do any of that powerlifting stuff. So I just— only thing I can do is run. Running didn't bother me too bad. And it got to the point where I couldn't run either, and my health got real poor. Then my spine was collapsed, and, um, I just got real sick. And basically I healed myself. No doctor can find out what's wrong with me. So I couldn't run a lot. I couldn't do any activities. So I said, you know what, I'm gonna bury myself in stretching. And what happened was I had the shoes knot on the back of my head. The knot came from my spine collapsing and getting tighter and tighter and tighter. It developed fluid or whatever. Long story short, as I started stretching out, that bump started going away. And the smaller the bump got, the healthier I got. And I was like, what in the world is going on? So I would— so I shave every day, so I would feel this bump. And the bump— and you can see it right now. Yeah, yeah, no, I can see it. Yeah, most people think everybody's a bump in the back of their head. My bump was like this big. It was huge. And the more I stretched, the The more it went away, the more it went away, the more, the healthier I got. I was like, man. So I'd be like, I'm gonna keep on stretching. So my stretching became, it was crazy and I got healthier and I was like, my gosh. So I stretched more and more and more. And now it's, I've been doing it now for 3 years. I haven't missed a day of stretching in 3 years. Belief is something, it's not, I can't tell you, oh, believe in yourself. That's a bunch of crap. Belief came for me was going through those hell weeks. Taping those legs up, getting up early in the morning by myself, no coach, getting myself up, motivating myself every single day. When I'm out there in 240-mile runs and I don't want to be out there and I'm 90 miles into it and I have 150 miles to go and no one's there saying, "Come on, David," I'm forming belief. Many people form belief in many different ways. For me, this is how I do it. So when those hard times come my way, I know exactly how to get through them. When I first self— so I self-published my book, Can't Hurt Me. No one believed in me. I believed in myself. I sold almost 5 million copies of that. Now I never finished this case. It's coming out December 6th. Never finished, I guarantee you. The audiobook will probably go down as probably one of the best audiobooks— it sounds cocky as hell— of all time. It's truly amazing what we put into that book because of how I've lived my life. A lot of people come up here and speak about motivation and pushing yourself, and they're not doing it. They're not waking up every single day They have a canned speech they go off and they tell you about, about what to do, how to do it. Wake up every morning, make your bed, take a cold shower, all that crap. I'm telling you right now, you have to be that person that leads from the front. Many of you out here are in leadership positions, and many of our leaders right now are not leading from the front. They're leading from the rear, but they're telling you how to do it. They're waking up late. They're not doing what they say. So in life, it's real important to do what you say because that's where true knowledge comes from. And when I was going through Navy SEAL training, there's one thing I told myself. I wanted to quit every single day. But many dreams die while suffering. And many of us out here have suffered. And when you're suffering, I'm not talking about just physically, I'm talking about emotionally, spiritually. It could be a relationship. When you're suffering, you give up on the very things that you wanted the most. When I was going through pararescue, I wanted to be a pararescueman so bad, but that water haunted me. So when the suffering got too much, my dream died. And pretty much I almost died with it. If I didn't find Navy SEALs and getting past that hump and overcoming my demons and facing my demons every day, I would have never been up here today. You cannot outrun your demons. They'll always know where you're hiding. Trust me at that. And I'm gonna end with this. Don't stop when you're tired. Stop when you're done. My definition of greatness is this. It's not a definition, it's an example. Mm-hmm. This is greatness. True greatness. Let's say that I'm the greatest tennis player of all time. Okay, let's say that. I hate tennis. Yeah. Yeah. Let's say I'm the greatest tennis player of all time. And I did 22 years. I won all the Grand Slams. I have all the— I beat Roger Federer. I, I am the best ever. And we're having an interview and you're talking about my greatness, what I achieved. Now I'm retired, don't play tennis anymore, haven't touched a racket in years, and you're making me go back through my life. You're kissing my butt about how great I am. Sure. And I'm answering your questions. Every question I'm answering it, I'm with you. But in the back of my mind, all I'm thinking about is all the times I could have won those matches that I lost by not bringing my best mindset. Mm-hmm. You're haunted by all the opportunities that you missed by not bringing your best at that time when you could have won, but you didn't win because you allowed life to interfere with that one shot. When you're sitting there getting ready to serve for the match and your mind is not thinking about where that ball placement needs to be, but thinking about your family, this or this at work, or that at work. Mm-hmm. That's greatness. Greatness is your recall on every single shot that you missed throughout a 20-some year career. Every shot you can go back and say, I was here, this person was in the red shirt there. Greatness is being so aware of the time of life and the second that went by, and you can recall like it was yesterday. Greatness is being able to go back there, not making that same mistake again, and being haunted by it. That is greatness. I realized that God wasn't going to give me a get out of jail free card. And from the time I was born until the time I was 19 years old, my life had these hurdles. I constantly hit obstacles, obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And I, I had to figure out how to manage suffering, how to, how, like, how to deal with it. Cuz it'd be part of my life forever. At least that's what I thought. So in order to deal with it, I had to be able to conquer it. And overcome it and deal with it. Know that in this suffering, there has to be some kind of growth. With every obstacle, I look at it as friction. Now, without friction, there is no growth. You have to have friction in your life to grow. So I started looking at all these different things versus the 'what was me' mentality, like, 'Oh my God, look at my life. My life's so— I come from this family. I'm being beaten. I'm being abused mentally, physically.' I started looking at it as as the perfect trial ground. So I had to flip it upside down and say, okay, I'm suffering tremendously mentally. Use this to your advantage versus your disadvantage. So that's what I did versus looking at it as like, oh my God, woe is me, I'm never gonna get out of here. I looked at it as, okay, hang on a second, hang on a second. If I can overcome this, if I can find some power in this, some way to get through I get through this, that right there will be the fuel for the rest of my life. And so I found great strength in suffering, great strength in it, because why? Through all of that, it started to callous my mind over the victim's mentality. This whole thing about suffering, yeah, it sucks really bad, uh, really, really bad, but we all live on this side side of suffering. On this side, this nice box that's very comfortable, that we know when everything is going to happen, we're in it, it's good, we know how everything's going to turn out. It's those few people who are willing to go on the— on this side of suffering. And once they get through that, ask him how he feels now, his mind, how far he grew in that short period of time. He grew so much more than the normal person because he was willing to go outside himself. Because on the other end of suffering is greatness. It's not over here. So a whole bunch of us, we put ourselves in this great box, and in that box there's no suffering in it. So what we do is we, is we, is we shelter ourselves from greatness. So For me, for instance, I was 300 damn pounds at one time in my life. Sprayed for cockroaches, made $1,000 a month. I was living in that box. I would sometimes look over the box and I saw hell, suffering, storms, avalanches, tornadoes. I don't want to go over there, but I knew if I can get through that mentally, on the other side was 185-pound person who's a Navy SEAL, went through Ranger school, only person to do this, only person to do that, only person to do this. But that's through all that, all that I have to go through. So you peek over the box and you go back in and say, oh, I'm okay being 300 pounds making $1,000 a month, right? I'm okay over here. And on the other side is where you start to really start your journey. People think they start their journey because they're born. No, there's a lot of people in graves who have lived 100 years and have never started their real journey. Your real journey starts when you go outside that box and you start climbing mountains. You start climbing mountains and you think you're at the top of the mountain. You go down the other side of it, think I'm here. You look up, there's another fucking mountain. And it goes on and it goes on and it goes on. And just when you're getting ready to quit, you crash press that final mountain, you get down and you look, and there you are. And it starts to make sense to you then. It doesn't make sense to you until you get outside that box. I'll talk to so many people, and what I say is not for everybody. So many people don't have any clue on what the fuck I'm saying because they're in this box, and it's their brain. You first must go through suffering to find that great peace We're all looking for— a lot of us want to have— there's a lot of books out there about this 5 steps, do this, do this, do this, get there. No, man, it's not that easy. To find real permanent peace and enlightenment, you must go to the dark side of who you are. I could have easily just shoved my whole life under a rug and went straight to peace. Are you happy there? Do you ever became nothing. You jumped hell, you skipped hell. For you, you forego this part of your life, you skip it and go right to peace. So you always have this thing back here that's haunting you, and that's that darkness. You must go into the darkness to truly find that light that you're looking for, because that's what's on the other side of that. People get it all wrong, man. You, you have to face suffering. You have to face this dark side, this darkness. And there's a lot of energy in there. There's a lot of goodness in there that you can use to find greatness. But you cannot find your peace you're looking for in yourself until you overcome yourself. Never pick the easy road. Mm. Never, never. And it always goes back to kind of that, the hero mentality. Never pick the easy road ever in your life. That is the one road that is doom. It is doom. If you want something like 6-minute abs, all these different things, like you want it so fast, you, you may achieve what you wanted, but you want the permanent fix. The permanent fix comes from the hard road. The hard road. Gives you permanent results. The easy road gives you the quick fix. You will go back to where you started on the easy route. That hard route is so permanent that it ends up callusing you everywhere. Everywhere. You keep a six-pack forever. You keep it because you know the work that goes into it. Yeah, it's funny that you're sitting here saying that like things like public speaking you find hard when you've done all the crazy insane stuff that you've done? Because I do them alone, right? I do them alone. Yeah, you know, like I, I pick these hard things that most people think you can't finish anyway. So, you know, you go out there, you grind, you're alone, you're in your own head. I work best alone, right? I work best alone. So those are easier, you know. I figured out a way to kind of challenge, you know, kind of challenge, uh, your mind channel it and challenge it at the same time. And I figured out a way to kind of just become, have an indestructible toolbox in your mind. So those are easier. I think that when you die, this is just my own mindset, that you arrive in line. It helps me to get past a lot of things. You, you arrive in line and let's say you're in front. Let's say you die right before me and you're in line and God's sitting there with the clipboard. Okay. Sitting there with clipboard, like me and you sitting right now. He's looking at you and he says, hey, you made it to heaven, good job. Okay, and then he shows you the clipboard of what your life should have been. So you live this life that you thought you pushed so hard, then you look at the clipboard. Let's say myself, this is now me, I'm talking about myself now. Let's say I got to heaven weighing 300 pounds. I was a, a guy that worked for Ecolab, was the guy that kills cockroaches for a living. What's the fine, it's a job. But then I look at this, and that's how I died. I look at this and it says on here where I should have been, because God's all-knowing, right? I look at this and it said, you should have been 185 pounds, you should have broke Ginsburg's world record, you should have been a Navy SEAL, you should have been this, should have been that, you should live this great life, you should have been an inspiration, you should have inspired millions. And then you get the clipboard back to God. Let's say you lived 80 years on Earth and now you realize that you lived here being a shell of who the fuck you should have been. Now you're in heaven, but are you really in heaven? Because now you see how much you've fucked left down there on Earth. The root cause of the quitter isn't that you can't do 100 push-ups. You can train anybody to do that. The root cause of the quitter is when you get in hell You can't process it. It's too much to process because your mind starts going back to the real reality of like, I'm not ready, I'm not good enough. It's not trained. So I started training this, realizing that the only thing that makes me quit, it's not the muscle fatigue, it's the mental fatigue that makes me quit everything in life. So I became a practitioner of the mind. The mind's a very powerful thing. It has a tactical advantage over you all the time. It knows your fears, right? It knows your insecurities. It knows where you don't want to go, so it will guide you away from that. And that's why the mind will always win until you reprogram it. It'll always win until you reprogram it, because the mind controls you. Why is that? It's your mind. It's your mind. Because all those things that happen to you in your life, all those bad things, all those things that you blame other people before. They're now yours to own. You got to figure out a way to reprogram your mind to get outside the box. There's always a blockade. There's a barrier in your brain. There's a barrier. You got to find out what kind of removes that barrier from your brain. My biggest barrier was my father. And once I removed that barrier, I was free to think. And once I felt good about myself, I was free to put action in. I never felt good about myself. I never felt good about myself. Whenever I would get somewhere, the demon would come back, put me right back in the cage. If you don't go back— like, I'm a runner, left knee hurts. A lot of people focus on that left knee. A lot of times it's your right hip. And that's about life. You got to figure out what has messed you up mentally. Go to the source. Go to the source. Go to the origin of the source. Like peeling an onion, strip it down. And that's what I did to myself. So that, you know, that whole accountability mirror— did you do it on your own? Did you do it with any help? Every single thing I've ever done that's in that book or anywhere else was on my own. Everything. If I can flip these insecurities upside down, if I can flip this fear, if I can flip all this shit that made me this depressed, insecure guy, if I can flip it and make it work for me versus against me, I started seeing the power, the power in failure, the power in insecurity, the power in self-doubt, because I looked at everybody, it may not be true, but that's how I looked at everybody as being way above me. And I thought to myself, if I can be at the lowest part in the world, in the sewer, and be able to overcome all this shit, I started using that as power. And I slowly started passing the guys from Harvard, the guys from MIT, the guys who were these great, from great families. And I'm like, oh my God, I'm catching up. I'm catching up. I had nothing. So I started flipping it and using this power. I had a starting point, and the starting point was this very scared, immature, fragile kid. But through figuring out this fragile kid, I found out through all this muck, this can come out the other end. A person that has 4,030 pull-ups who runs miles and miles and miles at a time. But we all have these abilities. Not just to run and do pull-ups, but these abilities that once we go back into our dark holes that a lot of us have, a lot of us come from, you know, insecurities, a lot of issues, but we don't want to visit that place. Place is scary. Place is something that we want to forget about. I had the courage finally to go back in there and organize that shit. Mm-hmm. Get it organized in my mind and figure out, you know, where to start from. Mm-hmm. So, But the journey led me to the so-called superhuman stuff that I do now. For me, my routine is every night I stretch out and I stretch out for 2 or 3 hours every single night without fail. Yeah. And while I'm stretching out, I'm thinking about my plan for the next day and I'm thinking about all these different obstacles that may come up. So basically a lot of us aren't prepared for life. We get up willy-nilly. And just hope life is gonna happen. It is gonna happen, but it's gonna happen with a prepared mind or an unprepared mind. Most people attack life with an unprepared mind. What I do is I try to account for all things that could happen, might happen, probably will happen, and then the unknowns. So basically I can't account for everything, but I do know there could be some things that come up in life that you need to be ready for. I know for a fact I'm not gonna wanna work out tomorrow. Therefore, I'm preparing my mind for that. Mm-hmm. I don't wanna do that. I know tomorrow's gonna come with some difficult decisions to make. It may come with getting a phone call saying someone died, this happened, that happened. I'm always preparing myself, not in a morbid way, but just like, look man, be ready for life. Mm-hmm. Don't let life just start attacking you left and right. Make sure that you start to build a mental armor so then you're ready for life. And that comes with a very physical way, and the physical helps out the mental. No matter how far you get in life, you have to be able to go back to scratch in your mind at a moment's notice. You can never get so far beyond scratch. Mm-hmm. What that means is When you accomplish something in life, if you wanna go back to scratch and go back to that $7 a month place where I once lived and visit that place for a long period of time, if you were here when you went back to scratch, you would now be here. Mm-hmm. Scratch is what makes you better. Scratch, friction, obstacles create growth. There's no friction when you're this far up in the game anymore. You think there is? When you achieve, that's right. When you achieve so much, the friction is, It's, it's minor cuz why? I'm sore. I'm gonna get a massage today. Mm-hmm. I'm hungry. I'm gonna eat today. Mm-hmm. The refrigerator's always full. So your comforts are now, so your discomfort is now very minuscule to your discomfort back here in the $7 a month place. So you have to go back to the total discomfort to then raise your level of where you're at now. I'm not saying stay there and stay there. Visit. Visit it. And then you raise your level. Take a day trip. That's right. Yeah. Always take day trips. Yeah. Don't stay there. That's right. But take a day trip. Take a day trip. So I went down to the gym and there's this like crazy elliptical trainer, but it's not a normal elliptical trainer. It's one that you like almost self-power. It is very— Yeah. It's not electric. You do— No. Yeah. Yeah. Very difficult. Yeah. So I got on that thing and I realized, man, this sucks. And after like 2 minutes I'm like, I don't wanna do this. So right then I realized, hmm, it looks like we're gonna be here for a while. Mm-hmm. So I did that for 2 hours and 45 minutes. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not saying do that, but that's something I did today. Once my mind said, you know what, let's not do this today. I said, well, since we're my mind went there, I redirected and said, just for having that weak thought, we're going to be on here for a while, right? So it does sort of sound like you're punishing part of your mind in a way. Punishment may not be the right word. Yeah, I want my mind to know who's in charge. So for the better part of 26 years, my mind was in charge of me. Me. Yeah, which is why I made all these horrible decisions. Once you take control of your mind, you start making decisions for yourself versus your mind making decisions for you. How do we learn from you and the SEALs to handle our pain when we're in the midst of pain? What— because it hurts, and it hurts physically sometimes, obviously, and then some of us are dealing with emotional pain. What do we do in those moments when we're feeling most pain and we're going, I cannot go one more second. So this is the thing. A few years ago, the Navy SEALs designed a program called, um, the BUD/S prep program. And my last 2 years in the military— I did 21 years— they sent me down to Great Lakes, Chicago, and we were training these guys to get ready to go to BUD/S SEAL training because a lot of guys weren't getting through. We thought this program would help them get through, right? So these guys would leave our program studs— push-ups, sit-ups, swimming, everything— but the numbers were the exact same. So I was scratching my head like, how the work these guys go through 2 months of this before they get the buzz and still quit? I started going back through my mind and realizing one thing: we were building bigger, stronger, faster quitters. Why is that? If you don't work on the one thing, the most powerful weapon in the world is your mind. Yeah. So to answer your question is this, whether it be physical pain or mental pain, we all have to start from zero with pain. And what that means is if you don't go back, we all have something that bothers us. Mm-hmm. Everybody in this world is insecure about something. That's right. Something in life, whether it be your family, your mom, your dad, your brother, your sister, your wife, your husband, your kids, something has messed you up. And whenever you're in physical pain, even though you might not be thinking about that mental stuff that happened to you, your mind is thinking about it. All these dungeons that we've created, all these trap doors that our life has created. Most of the time, we quit is because we don't have any mental tools to get us through the other side. Mm-hmm. So my whole thing for people is you have to examine why are you doing it in the first place? What makes people quit so much in SEAL training, in, in all other special ops training, is the mind is, it's always comfortable to sit there. You watch the Navy SEAL show. Yeah. Discovery Channel. You're in a 72-degree house. Oh yeah. You have your lemonade, your milkshake, whatever. Yeah, I can do that. Oh sure, you're comfortable. Although I'll say this, I never say that. Well, some people do. Yeah, a lot of folks think, you know, because it feels very comfortable in that comfortable environment. Oh, totally, absolutely. The second you get out there in that environment where it's 40 degrees, like in my third hell week, we, you know, we had a guy die of pulmonary edema. Died out there in my third hell week. You have to really want whatever you're going for. If not, all these questions that come up, like you said, how you go one more step further? Your mind's gonna ask you all these questions. How can you go one more step further? If you don't have the answers to that, and I can't give them to you. You have to know why am I here? For me, when I was going through SEAL training, I was willing to die. So all these negative questions that kept on coming up in my head, I had the answer for them. It's those people that don't have the answer for those negative questions. Right. And if you can't answer those questions, you will quit. Right. Would you say you've built this almost like sadistic quality where you almost enjoy the pain? I don't enjoy it. It's necessary. Yeah. It's necessary. So every morning I wake up it's not just about working out, but for me, working out has been a very big part of my mental growth. So for me, if I am not challenging myself every day, and I swear to God, people will not believe it, I was over almost 300 pounds twice in my life. A person that does that twice in his life does not enjoy cardiovascular activity. Okay? Yeah. So people can put anything they want to in their head. I did realize one thing, the things I don't enjoy that I still do, that's where growth is at. Mm-hmm. And that's for me, the only place growth is at. Mm-hmm. Is in that very uncomfortable, you know, in that uncomfortable zone. Yeah. So I have to visit it every single day. When your mind, this is this, this, this whole 40% rule shit I talk about all the time that I made up a long time ago. I started making it up through pain. Tell them what that is, where'd you go? So basically the 40% rule is I am a strong believer that we quit. Cause why? How the fuck is a 297-pound cockroach guy who quit on everything is now considered one of the best men on the planet? How is that possible? It means I had to change one thing, my mindset. So there's no way in hell that that was in me, but that was, that guy was in me. Well, that guy came down here and said, hey, guess what, man? You're a fat ass, but I'm gonna now make you a badass. I want to miracle this to be a badass. No, it was in me. I had to believe and make that belief work. And through hard work, I did that. So the 40% rule was like, we have like a car. Some cars have a governor on it, and when you get to like 92 miles an hour, that car start doing this because it can't go any faster. Those cars that don't have governors on, like a fast-ass whatever, Porsche or whatever, I'm gonna bury it, gone. We have that ability in us, but we have put this governor on our minds. And you have to, the factory that put the governor on that car, the factory is now you, that put that shit on your fucking mind. You gotta take that shit off. Until you take it off, you're gonna constantly get to 92 miles an hour and do this. Yeah. Cause you ain't gonna go no faster. Yeah. In fact, you might even go slower. Mm-hmm. So basically I started realizing this through my life, through going through all these times. It's more important to, to own your weaknesses. You got to really triple down on those, man, because why you want to become a full human being. We like to run away from weaknesses. Like for instance, if you're good at running, all you want to do is run. Mm-hmm. If you're great at reading, You have several books, but we don't do those things that we're not good at. So for me, I realized I keep on running away from these things I'm not good at. I have to dive into these things. I have to become one with these things, and that's what happened. And so I, I, I own them both. Yeah. And I talk very openly about 'em both. Do you think there's, I don't know if balance is the right word, but do you think there's, there is a point in time where you can sit back and say, let me take this in a little bit? I for a long time was probably the most unbalanced on the planet Earth. And I take, I took great pride in that. Yeah. I, it was on, it was on purpose. It was on purpose cuz I knew for me to get to where I wanted to go, where I had to go, there could be no balance. Hmm. There, there could be no, well, 8 hours a day I do this and then yeah, no 9 to 5, right? No, no, no. It had to be, I'm such in a spot in my life. I'm such in a dark place that if I don't dedicate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 a year to becoming a better human being, it's not gonna happen. Yeah. And so the people who were in my family had to realize, hey, I'm sorry that you may think I'm neglecting you right now, but if I don't fix myself, I won't be good for anybody. So yeah, I became very unbalanced for a long time. I mean, balance is important, but you have to first go to war with yourself. You gotta figure out what you're about. And be proud of who you are before you start to get that teeter-totter nice and balanced out. So yeah, that makes sense. I think, I think if I'm hearing you right, what I hear is that in order to create maybe some of that balance down the road, you have to get a foundation under you. That's right. Right. If you don't have that foundational knowledge of who you are and how you show up and what you're capable of, yeah, it's pretty hard to walk in any sort of balance between work and career and family and all the other things. That you have going on. That's right. So if you read my book and you see what goes on, you'll see how many mistakes I make along the way trying to find balance, trying to find peace in myself. And I myself all up. I'm, I'm having relationships. I'm having, you know, I, I get a girl, you know, knocked up. She's pregnant. I'm, I'm in the worst spot of my life. You know, I don't have a real job. I'm going through SEAL training. I haven't graduated SEAL training. I'm going back through SEAL training for the third time, and now I have a girl that's pregnant. I, I'm all over the place. I don't have, you know, I have no money. I have, I have nothing. And I'm, and I'm establishing a life with a family and I'm all fucked up. So, you know, a lot of us get in situations where we start establishing all these different things that pop up, all these different popup boxes in our life is fucked up cuz we haven't fixed ourselves. You know, until you fix yourself, don't start another journey before you finish your own journey first, or not finish it, but at least get a good, you know, foot start into it. So I'm the only person in the history of Navy SEAL training to go through 3 Hell Weeks in 1 year. Can you explain a little bit what Hell Week is? Yeah, no problem. Because I heard it on your audiobook a lot. Yes, sir. And it just sounds like a painful moment that very few people are able to handle it. It is a very long, painful moment. So I don't know what week it is, but For me, it was my third week. Mm-hmm. And sometimes it's your third, fourth, or fifth week in Navy SEAL training. Um, Navy SEAL training is 6 months long, and this is like the biggest crucible in Navy SEAL. It probably in, in all of special forces, you know, special ops, it's 130 hours of continuous training and you might get 2 hours of sleep. And the whole idea is you start on Sunday. And you end on Friday. You might get 2 hours of sleep. And the whole idea of this training is to get a man and break him down to nothing. And that's where you see what a man's made of. So to make it through one, most people say, I'm never going back through again. So I was fortunate. God blessed me. So I started looking at, at these failures as blessings. Because with all, with all these failures and all these bullies and all these being abused and all in my learning disabilities and stuttering and everything I had in my life, they are really gifts. Yeah. And it's not some psychological babble that I'm using to say, oh no, my life wasn't that bad. No, my life sucked. But they truly were gifts because all these different trials and tribulations led my mind to where it's at now. So, um, Hell Week, once again, 130 hours, you get 2 hours of sleep maybe, and they beat the shit out of you. Beating like push-ups, sit-ups, and it's, um, near the Pacific Ocean. So you're out in the Pacific Ocean, back in, and that water's freezing. And so you see these men, these great men that I watched on TV, I'm now with them. And For the longest time, I put people who had better childhoods, better grades, better this, better that, I put them all above me. But now I'm on the same playing field as them. So when you get on the same playing field as these men who you think are better than you, you look at them eye to eye. Mm-hmm. And you realize that they're not. So once again, I'm starting to do all this live autopsy, like saying, God, man, you are mind yourself your whole life thinking that this person came from a nicer house, better education, better mom, better dad, and they're better than you. It's not the case. You have this in you. You may have to dig a little deeper to find it. You know, their, their family may have started them off a lot better than you, but it's there. Yeah, it's there. So I started really realizing how powerful the mind was. In that third Hell Week? For several years, I gave myself a way out. When you were 300 pounds or— No, I was 300 pounds when I was— all the way up till I was 24 years old. I would climb a mountain, I'd fall back down. I'd start climbing, I'd fall back down. For the first 24 years of my life. I went to my first Hell Week, my second Hell Week, and then my third Hell Week came in SEAL training, and the CO, Captain Bowen, looked at me I'm on crutches, I'm all jacked up. He says, hey, this is your last time you're gonna go through BUD/S. This is it. I had several stress fractures. I had double pneumonia. I was jacked up and he gave me a few months to heal. And he said, this is your last time going through. I shouldn't even let you go back through. Wow. I started Navy SEAL training with stress fractures. Stress fractures. That's, that's hard to finish. Stress fractures. Starting the hardest training, arguably the hardest training in the world with stress fractures. and this is when I started to not put a cap on the body. If the mind is there, every morning I would wake up at 3:30 in the morning, 4 o'clock in the morning, go to my dive cage, go in there before anybody saw me. I'd get duct tape and I would tape from my forefoot all the way up to the mid of my calf, and I would put two black socks on. And so I ran not using the pivot. Oh my gosh. And I ran my hip flexors. So for the first 45 minutes to an hour, I was in absolute excruciating pain. But what motivated me through that whole process was the fact that this kid came from that. I'm in the hardest training in the world, in the worst shape of my entire life. What if I can graduate amongst these studs. Wow. All these guys around me are studs. They're stallions, they're gladiators in my class. They're all healthy. Most of 'em, they're not broken like this. They may have some, you know, every, everybody's sick going through that training. Yeah. But if I can graduate, it would change everything for me. If I can start the hardest training in the world broken and graduate. So my mind fed off of that. You are now from the weakest man. You are now the hardest man to ever live. If you can do this, if you can do this, life is one big mind game. Yeah. And you're playing it with yourself. Is it true? I don't care. It got me through the hardest training, starting out broken where most people quit. I had just started. Wow. And when you take that mindset and you learn to flip that around, that's what made me powerful. And my body followed. And 3 months later, my stress fractures were healed by running on them. Do you like suffering or do you just deal with suffering? Real answer. Real answer. Yeah. Real answer. I like to get a bunch of men together. Okay. Men that are the hardest of the hard. And I want to be with these men and I want to see them suffer because I'm suffering right along with you. But I want to see me get through it. I want to see what you're made of. I want to see like almost like the Coliseum in Rome. Let's go to the Coliseum. And the only way to see who the baddest is, is to suffer. You can't do it by writing a paper. So let's go. Because why? What I found out through my life was I thought of myself as some weak little kid. And what I found out, and the only message I want to get across to people, is once you change one thing, your mindset, you can attack everything. And I find it fascinating I'm fascinated because I'll be in these moments. I put these guys on some pedestal. Yeah. Which people do with you. They do with me and they shouldn't. And I was this guy who was a piece of shit looking at these. My God, how are you guys? It's amazing. But once I worked my way up there, I said, my God, man, we can all compete. Let's go. So do I like suffering? I like suffering in the way that is competitive. Yeah. That brings out the absolute best in me and in everybody else. Mm-hmm. So like, I want to see a man be defeated. Mm-hmm. I want to see a man get broken and say, I love these men. Mm-hmm. These men I love, but there's very few of them. Mm-hmm. There's very few of them, and there's very few that are willing to go there more than once. Is there any part of what you do in your day that actually just really enjoy? It's not overcoming demons or overcoming voices. You just actually think, this just actually makes me happy and I really like it. What's funny about all this is sitting over there— oh yeah, well, well, my fiancée is one of them. But honestly, what's funny about this is people may hear all this and say, God, this guy's such a structured guy, talking about demons, getting over things. That sounds like his whole life. It's true, but I'm the most peaceful person on the planet Earth. Even with like the conversation, I gotta go to the gym, I have to do this, I have to do that. Every day I'm winning. Every day I'm winning the, uh, the other voice in my head. So I'm, I'm very, I'm, I'm at peace with myself. Mm-hmm. The things I do for fun are like me bettering myself. Yeah. I love sports. I love watching sports, but I also love accomplishing and overcoming myself every day. Cuz every day is a battle. Every day is a battle cuz your mind wants to choose the path of least resistance every day. But you don't become better by, by ever doing that. Mm-hmm. You become normal and I don't want to be normal. Mm-hmm. So it may not be a life for everybody, but I find a lot of peace in not being normal. In my life. So I'm gonna show you something I haven't shown anybody before. Oh no, I don't know, I don't know. No, I'm not gonna show you none of that stuff. So you see these little spots right here? My body? Yeah, yeah, see this? Yep. So basically these— everybody wonders what happened, right? These are very small spots. I look like a leopard all over. They were all over my body, really. So just to give you me some insight. So I've talked about on several podcasts, but I haven't shown anybody like my leopard skin and what happened. So I could take off my shirt, I can show you all kind of nastiness, man, but I'm not gonna do that. I can show you my ears, and I'll show you one thing right now. This part right here, you see this little dry spot in my ear? Oh yeah, yeah. And if I were to dig in my ear right now, nothing but shit would come out. Really? A whole bunch of crust. I'm taking you there. Why? This is a man show. That's right. That's right. We're gonna go there. Let's go there. Okay, we'll go there. So I don't talk about it on most shows, but what happened was over a period of time of me literally trying to transform myself, and a guy asked me a question yesterday, man. Um, am I paying now physically for what I put myself through? I said, yeah, I am. But what he doesn't understand was I, when I was 297 pounds and I was a piece of shit, I wasn't going anywhere in life. I asked myself that question before I decided to put myself through hell. Are you willing to do it? Am I willing to pay the price? Am I willing to do it? And I'm willing to pay the price after I fucked myself up. I knew for me to get to where I wanted to go, I didn't have the ability. The ability was not there. So I knew I was gonna have to break myself off to do it. Some people are born with this great talent. I wasn't smart. I, I wasn't some physical specimen. I wasn't any of that stuff. So I knew for me to go through all of At the end of it was gonna be a broken, broken man. So I did it. And in the process of doing it, I knew all along the way I'm gonna one day. And that time came, that time came. And in that book, that psoas muscle I'm talking about, right? Literally from me being in that fight or flight mode and pushing and pushing way beyond what I thought was even possible. I kept on finding new and new and new limits as I was going on this journey. So, but in doing that, you're breaking your body down tremendously. Sure. Yeah. So what happened to me was my— that psoas muscle attached to your lower body, your upper body. Mine became so tight that it literally left probably, I would say, baseball-sized lumps on my hip. And those— so these are my muscles that just tightened up and tightened up up to my hip flexors. And it was just contracting right there, just contracting right here. So I looked, I had two, two lumps like this were right here, and no one knew what they were. And on the back of my head, I had a big lump on it, and you can kind of see it now. Oh, right, yeah, I can. It used to be an extra inch and a half. Really? So This is where my sickness was coming from. So the doctor was giving me all kind of fucking medication and slowly but surely I kept on getting worse and worse and worse. No one, because you were going through the same type of training at this point, or were you hung up at this point? So at this time I'd already done like 19 years in the military. Yeah. I had done all these ultra races and all this other shit. So I, I had gone through the gamut, but no one knew that every time I got to the start line of an ultra race, I was fucking broken at the start line. So I didn't go into ultra race like, oh, I'm healthy. I'm ready to go. I'm all juiced up. I went to start line at every damn race I ever did broken. A lot of times I went to start line with stress fractures, compression tape on. If you look at me in that Badwater tape in my first Badwater, you can see at the end of Badwater, there's a video before I get interviewed and they're taking off the compression tape. I had that start line, damn Rex. You started with something. So my mentality was, was grand animalistic. It was, it was, it was something that, that it was, it was barbarian type of like, like a mentality. So, but that cost me, it cost me a lot. But, um, and that's what happened to my body. My, my body slowly started to, uh, literally choke itself out. So I lost 2 inches of my height due to that psoas muscle that's attached to your T12. Just gripping down. So what you see here, all these little leopard spots on my body, is basically as I started opening my body back up, infection started coming out everywhere. So I got to the point, and I hid it from the SEAL teams for a long time, the last 2 years as a Navy SEAL, I couldn't Valsalva, which is clearing your ears to go underwater. Yeah, that depth was probably tough. But luckily we dropped you know, we, we were diving dragger systems. So you only go down like, like, like 15, 20 feet, but still at 15, 20 feet, you still gotta equalize and, you know, and get your, you know, Valsalva. So I was literally just busting my eardrums out to go down because all that earwax that's now coming up, I got so tight, my traps and everything shut off my eustachian tubes. So whenever the doctors would go, they'd go, hey doc, I cannot clear my ears. They would go in and check my eardrum and they'd be like, you have the cleanest ears I've ever seen in my life. You don't have any earwax. Why? It was trapped and cut off. So the second I opened all this up, and my fiancée will tell you, it's the grossest shit. It just comes out like for 2 and a half years now because it's been backed up again. It's just, it's a, it's a sick, it's, and then The, the leper spot. So I, I open something up in infection. It's, it's, it's, it's something that I could write a whole fucking book about. But now after 5 years of doing this shit, I am, uh, in the best shape of my entire life because my body, even going into SEAL training, cuz my, my childhood was so messed up. Yeah. And that psoas muscle starts to get tight then that I went into SEAL training really outta shape. As far as my health. Sure. And I just, I would tape it up. My mentality was taping up, man. I just taped it up and kept on going in it and I paid the man, but it was worth it. Life beat me the fuck up bad. I mean, I was knocked out in the 12th round of a 15-round, you know, heavyweight bout. I was knocked out. But what happened was in the 12th round, when the challenger turned his back on me, I was getting fucked. And I got up and won the next 3 rounds and knocked that motherfucker out in the 15th round. So that's my mind about can't hurt me. I was hurt, man. Like literally I had to overcome so much those first 26 years of my life and I still do every day today. You know, it's not over. Yeah. But the mentality of can't hurt me is just that no matter what's in front in front of you, man, you have to face, you have to confront, you have to overcome and move forward. So my father, you know, some of the kids that bullied me, my learning disabilities, all these things I went through in life— stuttering, you know, has so many different issues, failing and failing and failing— I'd overcome them or they would have overcame me. What moment in life was it when you just said like, fuck with this? Did you work on all your weaknesses? You changed yourself, right? Because I saw the picture before. Yeah, right. And now, now you look so healthy, so fit. You look like a, like a perfect human being. This is— well, what happened was, so I graduated high school. I finally graduated. I finally passed the military entrance exam, the ASVAB. I wanted to be an Air Force pararescueman, and I won't get deep into that, but I failed miserably at that. So I went from 160 175 pounds out of high school to 297 pounds within a 4-year period. So basically I'm about 22 years old now, maybe, yeah, about 22 years old. I'm 297 pounds. I'm out of the Air Force and my job is I'm spraying for cockroaches at a company called Ecolab. So I'm making $1,000 a month. And my job is from 11 o'clock at night to 7 o'clock in the morning to go around and spray for cockroaches. So every night for 6 months I'm doing this job. So I finally get home one night and, well, trust me, it wasn't like overnight this happened. You're haunted by the mere fact that you're a piece of shit. Yeah. Every fucking day. And people who don't think that, you are fucking lying. So every day of my life, I'm haunted by. My father, the kids that bullied me, my own insecurities. All these things were just, just, just roosting in the back of my head. So I'd be driving home at like 7 o'clock in the morning from an all-night shift and all alone in my truck, and I'd be thinking, my life is hell. So one day I came home and I always come home and watch TV, and this show was on with like Navy SEALs. Yeah. And I'm afraid of water. I sink like a rock. So I'm sitting there watching these guys going through Navy SEAL training and I'm like, and I saw what I believed, how a man should feel, very, you know, have pride and dignity himself. Yeah. It's like, I gotta change myself. So literally I sat down on the couch and watched these guys going through SEAL training and I went through my own mental checklist of how up I am and how many things I would have to change just to get an opportunity to try out for something like that. Have to get smarter, have to get fit, have to lose weight, have to do all these things, start running, swimming, everything. So I finally get to a point where I get the courage to go to recruiter and say, hey, I want to go try to do this. But when you're 297 pounds and you want to go try to be one of the the fittest people in the world, yeah, you get laughed at. So I got laughed at a lot, but in this process, this process was actually hardening my mind. All the laughter, because the laughter used to make me cower. Now I realize I can no longer hide from my insecurities, hide from all these fears. I just start wearing them. Yeah, had to start talking about them, had to start being vulnerable because I was always afraid of them. So here I am now I'm facing them. I finally find a recruiter that says, hey, we'll take you in. And he says, you have less than 3 months to lose 106 pounds. I'm like, that's impossible. So that was my mindset, but I was like, hey, I can't have that kind of mindset. So I went into the dungeon and started using all my insecurities as strength. Instead of looking at being bullied and, and, uh, my dad messing me up and all that stuff like that, I looked at it as, Who could have survived all this and still be here with the opportunity to go into Navy SEAL training? And so I started using all these negative things and started flipping everything on top of its head. Instead of saying, what was me kicking rocks, head down in the dirt, I started saying, there's not a planet who would have this opportunity coming from where I came from. They, they would be a statistic. Yeah. So I started looking at it as power versus like big time defeat. Those scars are real. Those scars are proof that, you know, your past is real. Mm-hmm. So they're never gonna go away. I, I own them, but I'm, I'm, I'm proud of my childhood. I'm proud because without all of these lessons in life, and everybody says this, I mean it. Mm-hmm. I mean it. 'Cause I was able to look at my childhood and how I grew up. As the ultimate training ground for my life. Someone, there has to be some people in this, on this planet Earth who have my mentality. Mm-hmm. As gross as it is to some people and as far off as it is and not understood, there has to be some people like me on this planet Earth. Has to be some warriors out there that are able to take this mindset and do something with it. So that right there, once you are able to look at your life and realize that all these bad things are actually the ultimate training ground for what you're going to, you know, encounter in life, you start looking at your past very differently. I started to create the real Rocky. Hmm. I wanted to be the, the, the real version of a movie. And, but that's the hard part though. That movie's inspirational. And in my life, there's a lot of times in my life where it wasn't so inspirational. There's a lot of lonely moments where there was no Going the Distance song in the background to keep me going. Yeah. That music changes things, doesn't it? Yeah. Or lack thereof. Or the lack thereof, man. There's a lot of times, there's a lot of quiet times, a lot of failure, a lot of disappointments, a lot of starting from scratch. But that's when I started to develop a different mentality and I started to to develop a mentality of this is where it's at. Where you find out where you're at is when you're at the lowest part of your life. So I started to develop a whole new mindset. Like the lowest part of my life used to make me feel bad. The lowest part of my life now, it actually gives me strength because I know so many people stop. Mm-hmm. That's where they quit, right? When, when they get to the sewer of life versus looking at it saying, oh yeah, Now let's see what's up. Let's see the millions of men out here in this world. They're not going where I'm willing to go. Now, this is where people stop, and this is where I started to develop the different mentality. Is you wanna test my resolve? You wanna test my ability to go the distance? You wanna see where your life ends and mine begins? That's where that mentality started for me. Hmm. Cause I started saying, man, you, always end up in the dungeon. You gotta find strength in that. No one else does. So that, that Rocky movie was a little bit of a spark, but to become that person, it takes a lot. I was this nobody guy and I created this Goggins. And that Goggins, there's David Goggins and there's Goggins. David Goggins is a calm, cool guy that sits back, used to be, uh, you know, weak kid. Now he's just a normal guy. Goggins is a guy that is willing to tape up his legs to go after it. In that book, you read about David Goggins and also Goggins. What I realized in my life is that Goggins is who I love. Goggins is who I created. My dad created David Goggins. I created Goggins. So what's happening with me, and since Can't Hurt Me came out, and since I got on social media, which is why I don't like social media, which is why I'm not on there very much, which is why I give people one time. I have to do me. I have to do me. So people get it twisted, man. I am who I am. Yeah. What's in that book is me. Yeah. So now what they see is this guy who's trying to get people to get off their ass. That just happened to happen, man. I didn't set out— when I set out to be a SEAL and set out to go to Ranger School and all this, I did and break records. I didn't set out to please, right? I didn't set out to say, hey, pay me now, I got a great story. And I realize now that my life has kind of gotten to a point where people know me, I have followers and whatnot. The biggest depression of my life is you get caught up into helping so many people out and it's great and I love that, but you lose yourself in all of that. It literally— and people go, man, but my guy, like you're changing. I get all that, man. But what is motivating you in that book? What's motivating you is the stories I'm telling you about what I did in my life. Once I stopped living that, I'm no more. Yes. I am not that you are now being motivated from. So right now in the mirror, I now got back to Goggins. I'm now back to running 100 miles a week. I'm now back to getting— I saw and I talked to my girl about all the time, you travel, you speak, you know, you all that. It's all great and dandy for most people. I'm Goggins. What makes me me is the dungeon. And yeah, and people, well, oh my God, they're gonna hear this. My God, dude, you don't have any peace in your life. Don't get it twisted. Weak people who hear me get all poopy pants about how I talk. So be it. What changed me was I had to be hard on myself. Yep. And I have to continue to grind myself into fine dust. Period. That's where I feel good. I accomplished something. If things come easy, it's not fun. I must fail at something repeatedly. It has to haunt me. And then once I complete it, I feel like I accomplished something. I don't want to set out and say, "Oh, there's an A. We're good." No. I want to turn it in a million times and say, You fail. You fail. I said, okay, roger that. And sit there and analyze what I'm doing wrong. Go to these places that people don't go to anymore because all this social media, everything's computerized. I want to go to that dark place in my mind and say, okay, how are we going to get this done? Honestly, it was, um, I realized at a young age how to change myself was through discipline. And the military didn't didn't teach me that. It was something I realized I had zero discipline, zero self-discipline. And I realized I have to start developing this. And I started really, cuz I was horrible at reading and I was horrible at writing. I have so many learning disabilities, not even funny. So I just sit down at the table and spend so much time in this reading and writing and, and learning. And that kind of translated over to my self-discipline with, with with working out. So that's where it started. I started when I was about 16 years old and said, well, I'm a 4th grade reading level, you know, let me go ahead now and start really, uh, focusing because I'm not gonna get in the military because I gotta pass the test. Yeah. So that's where it started for me. I have zero anger. I'm a passionate guy, so I— but I get it though. Sure. The way I talk, the way I come across, I'm an aggressive guy because that's what it takes to, like, if you walk into a situation, into a fight, I'm not saying be so aggressive that you're, that you're so aggressive that, that you're making bad moves. Sure. But if you don't have a little flame burned in you knowing that I might get fucking hit real fucking hard, and when I get hit, I have to attack. I have to, I have to, I have to bring, I can't get knocked out. Right, right. You have to have that mentality of, and I went to Hell Week. I knew I was gonna get broken. I had to have an internal flame in me that could never be— it, it couldn't be kindling. Kindling, you put the water in the kindling, that shit's out, right? Nah. I had to be a fucking tree that is burning hard. It's burning for a long fucking time. And that's what I became, man. So it's not anger. Anger can't sustain you for a long period of time. Cuz once you get in a situation, try it, trust me. I tried it before. When you get in a real hard situation and you're miserable, miserable, that anger is gone. Mm-hmm. What comes up is real. The real feeling of who you are and where you're at. You don't wanna care about them people who made fun of you in high school or your dad beating the fuck outta you. Cuz now you're, you become selfish. You're like, let's say you're in hell week, you're that cold Water is 50 degrees and you're, and your balls in your mouth right now. You're sitting there thinking, oh dude, like your mind's not thinking those kids in high school bullied me or my dad. Right. That's the least of your worries. No, you're thinking, so let anger confuse you for so long. There has to be something so deep in you that drives you. So what, what really does it for me is I know what we're capable of and I know that most human beings aren't willing to go where I am. Mm-hmm. And that's a very, very dangerous thing. I'm not saying I'm better than anybody else. Everybody has this talent. Sure. It's not a talent. It's just realizing that we stop way short of our true potential. You know, right now until I'm dead, I'm still examining human potential. How far can the mind go? How far can we go as human beings? So that's, You know, I'm the, I call myself the Stephen Hawking of, of the mind. Mm-hmm. You know, he was obsessed with everything he, he ever dove into. You know, the guy couldn't walk or anything, you know, so he was like the mind. That's one thing he didn't wanna lose. Mm-hmm. And I became obsessed with it cuz it's the one thing that controlled me. So I became obsessed with this, what is this fucking thing up here that just has me on a, on a tightrope and just walks me into all these horrible decisions I make and makes me feel so pathetic and weak. Weak and insignificant and dumb and stupid and everything. I gotta get control of this thing. But it's amazing that once you get control of that thing, how far you can go. When I retired, I retired from the military with about $50,000 a year is what I'd probably make. For me, for a guy that grew up with nothing, I lived in a $7 a month place growing up for a long period of time, and then we moved to a $236 a month place. So basically you give me $50,000, I'm rich. Yeah. So my mindset was about helping people. And when people truly believe in your message and believe in who you are and they see that you're being honest and truly honest for the fact that, hey, I just wanna see you fucking be better. I don't want nothing. Maybe a thank you when you're older and you're walking around with your kids and your family. If you have a real authentic true message about people and people see that you're not trying to sell out and, and not trying to sell them things— because I knew how I felt growing up and I don't want anybody to feel that way. So when I give back, it's not about giving back to like say, oh well, hopefully down the line I can sell them something. Yeah, my message is truly authentic to how I came up and people feel that Therefore, the business is about them. Yeah. And I got— I have all these lessons learned through a life that God blessed me with as far as like, look, I didn't survive this life. I thrived in hell. Yeah. And through that, I was like a guy sitting back. I was like, just writing all this down. I became a poet in hell, just sitting there as hell was all around me. I was all calm, just taking it all in. Oh, I gotta, I gotta tell people this. I gotta tell people that, oh, I learned this. I learned that while most people run from it, I was learning from it. And now I'm just giving all this knowledge to people for free. Yeah. So in return, people are growing. People like the message. And, uh, when you have a good message, you grow a business. What gives me fuel is I know that most people who are blessed with so much talent, great parents, great upbringing, didn't come from where I come from. They're gonna quit before me. Having all the tools that they have, they didn't have the ability to examine themselves. When you have everything so nice in life, it's, it's great to have a great life. Yeah, no doubt. But what happens is you don't self-examine. You don't do a live autopsy. When you have a fucked up life, it almost forces you to do a live autopsy. It forces you to find strength from places that no one looks from because food is not at the ready. You know, you are me. I have a learning disability. It's not at the ready. I can't just pick up a book and start reading, right? Right. There's preparation behind everything I do. There's, there's everything I do has to come with so much preparation. It's despicable. It makes me sick. My own personal life makes me sick. That's why I'm so disciplined now. Without my self-discipline, there is no David Got it. Mm-hmm. Like I can't like stop reading. I won't be able to read tomorrow. It will, I will lose it that fast. Wow. Yeah. You know, I, you know, I cannot stop going to the gym. My mind is set up in a spot where, hey, the second I stop, it wants to stop. Mm-hmm. Because I had a quitting mind growing up. When you get beat the shit outta you all the time, your mind wants to go to that nice spot where you're comforted. Where you're not trying, where shit is easy. That's where your mind, it doesn't want to think. You have all these things in the mind and the mind can only absorb so much. So all the pain that has to go through, it does, it wants to push it away and say, let's not do that. So every day I'm fighting where the mind wants to go. So it's a, it's a, it's a constant, it's a constant evolution, man. I'm, I've never arrived. I've never— I'm kind of— that's right now I'm stretching out 2, 3 hours a day. Every— I'm trying to reinvent the wheel. I'm like, oh man, I went through Navy SEAL training being fucked up. I ran over 7,000 miles in 2007 being fucked up. I did pull-up records being fucked up. Now that the mind is so fucking strong, let the body catch the mind. So that's now where I'm at. So I'm always trying to reinvent the wheel and see what I'm capable of next. We live in a world that's so busy and so active and moving so fast. Right now I am sitting with Tom Ferry. Yeah. My mind is sitting with Tom Ferry. Yeah. It's not talking to Tom Ferry while thinking about, my God, I gotta order some more books. I'm sold outta here. I'm doing this, I'm doing that. Yeah. Yeah. That's the first thing about visualization. Yep. You must make sure to silence out all the of life, which is very hard to do. It is very hard because your visual picture must be clear. It has to be clear. It can't be like kind of in and out, like a, like a fuzzy TV. You got to see it. It has to become real. You got to take a snapshot of it a million times, put in the bank. That snapshot of me was getting that 4,021 pull-up knocked out because the record was 4,020. Yeah, I visualized that over and over and over again. I visualized what I was going to say because the guy's name was Steven Highland. I was thinking like what you were going to say to him. I was going to say to him on video when I finally got his ass. So I visualized success. But then I went through— that's the fun part. Yeah. I have to do 4,020 pull-ups to get to that 4,021 pull-up. I know now because it took me 3 chances to get it. All those failures, They were great for me to examine where I was at along the way. So I take all that and I put in the bank as far as visualization. Okay, when I get to 2,500 pull-ups, my hands start to rip. Okay, I get ready for that. So I started visualizing, how am I gonna handle the pain? Okay, then you start visualizing, okay, my nutrition was off. You start visualizing all these things because you have to mimic it a million times, but I can't mimic 4,020 pull-ups by doing it. But you can see all the milestones where you failed. That's right. And see yourself going beyond it. That's right. So that was my big thing about— I had to walk in, get the chalk, see it. I had to see everything over and over and over again. And when I realized I had to keep that visual, that picture in my head for 17 hours, it took me 17 hours to break that record. Record. So for 17 hours, while I used to be loud everywhere I went, I put these headphones in. I never listened to music, but I listened to one song, Going the Distance, you know, for 17 hours. It's 2 minutes and 13 seconds. Yeah, for 17 hours I had that in. That's a lot of Rocky. A lot of Rocky. And I just went here. Yeah, for— and so I was able to visualize every rep. Yeah, so I visualized my hand placement, making sure that felt right before I got going. I didn't ignore all the little pains. My hands got sweaty. Okay, that means I was aware of everything. That means, okay, my hand's about to rip. It's getting sweaty. Wipe it off. Be aware. Everything. I was totally in the moment because of how I visualized everything. So whenever times got hard, my mind said, you're not good enough. Right. Let's go. Right. So my mind wasn't— my eyes, my mind weren't connecting. Right. So how do you combat that? So how you combat that is this. I call it the cookie jar. Okay. You have to remind yourself we all have a story. We've all— all of us have gone through very hard times. But when we're in a hard time, our mind has a way of forgetting what all we've overcome. I have a way of taking one second when I want to quit and saying, okay, you endured this. So I look at my life and how I came up as the ultimate training ground versus most people look at it as why, woe is me, God, why, why, right? I had to flip this upside down and say, hang on a second, God was training me to be one of the baddest men on the planet Earth. Absolutely right. That's how he— this was, this was my journey. Like, for instance, in Hell Week, yeah, they said when you get to Wednesday of Hell Week, you're broken. So everybody on Wednesday— but give them context. You're talking 72 hours without sleep, 130 hours of training. Yeah, it starts on Sunday, ends on Friday, and on Wednesday you're almost done, halfway through. Yeah. So everybody on Wednesday, they hear this because everybody says Wednesday is like, man, you're so tired, you're done. So that becomes your new norm. Yeah. No, you're cruising into Wednesday getting ready to feel tired when you don't even know why, because someone told you you could feel tired. Bingo. So for me, I was like, hang on a second. I started studying my mind a whole bunch while growing up, facing these things. Don't listen to anybody's fucking dialogue but your own. They're tired. They're not you. Yeah. So it's just all about— it's just your mind has a tactical advantage over you at all times. It knows your weaknesses. It knows your strengths. And it will guide you into your nice comfort zone. We have to reprogram our mind to get it like a different vantage point. So then you know how to be in charge of yourself versus your mind being in charge of you. Everybody thinks I'm the world's toughest, right? Because if I just talk about I broke the pull-up record, I did all these races, I went through SEAL training, I was in 3 Hell Weeks, Ranger School, talk about all the badassery. Like we like to do on social media. Mm-hmm. And I don't tell you that I was a kid and I was scared of shit and I was depressed and insecure and, and all this shit. What good am I for anybody? Right. I'm a superhero. Mm-hmm. If I'm a liar. Mm-hmm. I'm that now, but I wasn't born that. Yeah. I had to make myself into this shit. When I was in the worst time of my life in Hell Week, I looked at everybody. And said, I'm the most trained person here. Yeah, well, that's the truth. I've gone through more mental torture than any of you all can even fathom. Yeah. So I'm looking at the baddest people on the planet, I'm looking at them like this, you guys can't hold a stick. So I started looking at versus like, I don't belong here, versus like, I might be the baddest person ever come here. Wow. Who could have pulled this off? Who could have been given a sewer to live in, in their mind, and say, okay, at birth I'm gonna put you in the worst place on the planet Earth, and let me see if you can go to the top of the mountain, right, with nothing, right, but just hard work, grit, and figuring it out, and not putting yourself back in the dungeon every time something got hard. So that's what became my daily voice, was, you really are the baddest person on the planet, right? After a period of time You start to believe that, right? So I worked with a few pitchers. I won't name their names, big-name pitchers, and I studied them for a long time. I want to be better, man. I want to be better. I want to be better. So I got film on them. I studied them. I studied them. Okay, what is wrong? That's it. Yeah, I saw it. Whenever something bad would happen on the mound, that's the first thing they would do. Totally. The head drops, shoulders roll They look down. That sends a direct message to your brain that I failed. Yep. I am a failure. Mm-hmm. That starts the downward spiral to being a failure. Yep. On that mound, you can't ever recover. Yeah. It's that— so I started teaching this. It's that person who you throw a bad pitch, you get the ball back, your chin is not high. 'Cause that shows that you're way too proud. Mm-hmm. Your chin stays here. Mm-hmm. Your shoulders stay nice and level. Your feet firmly on the ground. Your hands planted like I'm ready to beat somebody's ass and I'm ready for battle. It tells your mind, wow, maybe we didn't fuck that bad. We're still in the fight. Mm-hmm. So that's the one thing I always do is like, even if I fuck up, yeah, keep your body position like you're still a warrior. 100%. Like you're still fighting. If you get 100 bad calls in a row— Yep. Hello, I'm David Goggins. How you doing today? Yep. Okay, wrong one. Don't start getting poopy pants and get upset with yourself. No, it's a mentality, and your body language has a direct thing to your brain. Yes, it does. And how it functions. Every day I tell myself, I used to believe I was the weakest man that God ever created. So now I believe that I'm the hardest human being that God ever made. I don't care if it's true or not, it's the most important conversation to me. It's the thing that drives me every day. It, it, it's the one thing that keeps me going every day is that you must constantly be that man that you want to be. So before I start this journey to be Navy SEAL, I go back to see my dad because I realize now I gotta fix, I'm blaming everything. I gotta go back. You know how a lot of times you like, if you're a runner, your, your, your, your right knee may hurt. Mm-hmm. But it's not your right knee that hurts, it's really your left hip. Yes, but we're concentrating on the right knee. I'm concentrating all my— but I need to go back to the root of the problem, which is my dad. I gotta face the demon. So I go back and I, and I go back in as an older man now. I'm in my 20s, I'm not a kid anymore, and I want to see this man and face him as a grown man, but still as a kid in my head. I was still a kid, I was a grown man as my age. I went back and I realized he was the same man that he was. Still the same. Still the same. And I talked to him, he was still nuts. And I had to go back and face that one more time, but to face it in a different way. How'd you do it different? I looked at him in a way— we never said sorry to one another, and he went off about my mom and my grandparents and all kinds I looked at him in a way that I realize now why you fucked up. I had to almost be him to realize it's okay, brother, it's okay, because I realized that somewhere in your life something fucked you up and you didn't deal with it. And so you put that shit on me, my mom, and everybody around you. I'm gonna deal with my shit. So even though you gave me all this, you gave me a satchel of shit that I didn't deserve, and now I'm all fucked up and people think I'm a fucking liar. You gave me this. You created this fucking nightmare of Goggins. I'm gonna fix it though. I saw these Navy SEALs before I became one. My God, they're better than me. Yeah, they're better than me. I gave up 100 sets and I had to work up to realize these are human beings. Yeah. With the same shit I have. Yeah, some people can run faster, swim better, but mentality's mentality. Yeah. There's no, you're not gonna outwork me. Mm-hmm. So I'm gonna catch up somewhere. Yep. So that being said, I used all that 300-pound man, that fat guy, that dumb guy. People say, why do you say dumb? You have to be real with your fucking self. You gotta be raw. If you're not smart, you're fucking dumb. Yeah. But you can become smart. Yep. You can become smart. It's not a permanent tag. Yeah. You're dumb forever. Yeah. You're fat forever. No, be raw. Don't find the cushy word. I'm a big guy in visualizing. I'm a big guy in making a world. It may not exist. To me, it does. To me, it does. And I'm overpowering myself every day. And you gotta find tools to do that. That's a tool that I use. So that's what it's all about. I have a good living now for me where I'm at in my life. Mm-hmm. I was out on a fire in Colorado and we were digging fire line on this like 50%, like it was like on the side of a daggone mountain. Yeah. And we're trying to keep the fire from moving and we're digging this fire line 14 inches, or my fault, 18 inches wide, 3 miles long, 12 of us digging, and it is The hardest work, you make $12 an hour. Wow. Okay? Nothing. You set up your shop. Like, when you're done digging, you just pretty much lay down, you go to sleep, and you get up and you dig some more. Really? This happens for 2 weeks long. What are you digging? It's like a hole, you're digging a line? So you're trying to get down to a mineral source. So you're trying to get down to the earth. So that if that fire's moving, it can't burn dirt. Really? So you're moving fuels. Got it. You know, so not only are you digging, You're cutting down trees. It's hard work. But the moral of the story is I'm 43. Don't need to do it at all. This is why I do it. You're making money. I'm making money. I'm, I, I, I have a good life. I don't need to do it. Everybody ask me why I do it. This is why. This 21-year-old kid was out there and he wanted a pair of running shoes. That's all he wanted was a pair of running shoes. $60, $70, $100 bucks to whatever, you know, Easy for us. Yeah. 100 shoes. He looked up at the mountain that we had been on for days digging this fire line, and he said, that'd take me 5 or 6 hours of work to buy those shoes. Said, I'm not gonna buy 'em. It's the perspective of life. Mm-hmm. That perspective of life right there, of that is the value that we lose when things start to come so easy in life. It's the perspective that 21-year-old had. He looked up at that mountain and thought, he looked at his hands, he looked at the, at the amount of hours of pulling that Pulaski, that, that tool and raking that ground and, and then cutting those trees and moving 'em and that hours of work. He looked at his feet and said, these old shoes would do. Mm-hmm. It's that perspective in life that we lose. And that's, That story to most people may not mean anything. It's that story I always want to have in my life. You cannot lose perspective of where you've come in life. Because you made it this far in the video, I want to celebrate you. Most people start and don't finish. Most people never actually follow through. Most people say they want something, but they don't ever do the work to actually get it. But you are different. You are special. Believe Nation, you made it here all the way to the end, and I love you. So as a special celebration, if you put a hashtag #believe down in the comments below on this video, I will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome. If you want some incredible success motivation, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe. And I'll see you there. Here's the hard truth about getting great. It takes time and dedication. It takes a willingness to accept that you're not yet good enough. It takes the ability to stare at the places that you know that you're weak.