11 SECRETS To Tackling Goals Like A NAVY SEAL! (Achieve Anything You Want)| Lewis Howes

I don't spend a lot of time with regret. There's not much that you can do about it. It's happened. So the way I look at regret is what did I learn from it? The only way I can answer that question about why did I want to do it is because that is what my goal was. When I was told no, it made me want it a hundred fold.

My biggest fear in life is if there is a final resting place in this world. and you talk to something much bigger than you. I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with someone that says, you,'re in heaven. This is what you should have been on earth. Are you really in heaven now? Are you in hell?

We all have big goals and dreams, but sometimes we fail at accomplishing them. That's why in this video, I sit down with some of the top Navy SEALs in the world to talk about how to become disciplined and achieve any goal you have.

God put me in a very interesting spot in life where He made hell my teacher. He made hell my teacher. And a lot of people don't understand that. So I'm trying to give people a different thought process of life where failure, hell, disappointment, discomfort is a great learning tool. and many people don't understand that. And a lot of people won't even understand this interview when we get done with it. But it's these few moments in life that you have, like for me, I always talk about it. Rocky 1, round 14. That one two minute and 13 second clip of Rocky getting up when Apollo knocked him down. That one clip when I was going through a very bad time in my life, I saw what I wanted to be. There wasn't a guy that won. There wasn't a guy that won everything he did. It was a guy that kept getting up after being knocked down. So I realized if that two minutes and 13 seconds changed my life, so I was. I saw something that I needed to be in the world I was living in. Maybe my story. will give someone the two minutes and 13 seconds they need to change their life. Means that people live in a very comfortable place. That's fine. Don't listen to me. A lot of people are looking for that two minutes and 13 seconds and I might be that person. That's why I started sharing it.

Yeah, you talked about in the very beginning, I like this. What did you say here? Your job is to be the best of your ability. This will hurt. The mission is not about making yourself feel better. The mission is about being better and having greater impact in the world. And it sounds like you understand the fact that you need to put yourself out there a little bit more is gonna reach more people and impact more people as opposed to always being quiet.

Right.

Is that what I'm hearing?

Exactly. I had to find a happy medium. Yeah. You know, I had to find a happy medium because what's the point? Like we all have a story. And I believe that we're all teachers. We're all teachers. and if you don't learn something and give back like what you learned. Yeah. What's the point of living?

You're wasting.

Yeah, you're wasting. You have all this knowledge of what you learn. Some people may think you're crazy. Some people may, you know, may put a title on you, but it's, it is, you know, it's those few people who are like, you know what? I need to hear that. So you have to put yourself out there.

So was there an awakening for you in the last few years that said, okay, I'm not I'm not doing this enough. I'm putting myself out there. I'm not telling my story. I'm wasting certain aspects of my life by not giving that message out.

There were a lot of emails that came in to me. And I didn't realize, you know, when you live your life, you don't know what it's doing to people. 'Cause it's my life. I didn't know my life was as bad as it was because it's my life. It's what I went through. I think it's like the norm.

It's the norm.

Yeah. That's what I did, man. But when I started getting these emails from people saying, hey, you know what? You changed my life. That part changed my life. That part of your story changed my life. And because I have so many different parts of my life that so many people resonate with different spots, maybe it's the obesity part, maybe it's the bullying part, maybe it's the learning disability part, maybe it's the abusive parent part, whatever it may be. So many people draw from my story I started getting these emails and I was like, God, man, you know, and I'm a big believer in something more powerful than me. I don't know what it is, but I'm not the end all. So I was like, I gotta start doing more. If I'm touching these people's lives, a.

Few people here and there.

Right. Maybe I need to go out here.

And do some more.

It's a crazy story, man.

I mean, if you guys haven't gotten the book, you guys can pre-order the book. This is actually the galley copy here, printed out. Make sure you guys check this out. Can't hurt me. Master your mind in by the odds. And when I was reading the first part of the book about your childhood, I mean, your father just seemed like was just so abusive physically. I mean, it's one thing to be emotionally abusive and another thing to be physically. And when you have both, it's like the perfect storm of like the makings for chaos in your life. And it just sounded like he was just nasty. Nasty and everything was your fault and you were always wrong and you weren't living up to a standard both you and your brother and your mom. and it was just constant physical abuse over and over. I mean, the story of you just being bent over and him just whipping you over and over and you just gasping for air. I was just like, oh my gosh, this is crazy.

Right.

How did you deal with that? How did you overcome the constant physical and emotional abuse?

You know what? It's all I knew. So when you're born to that, it's all you know. I mean, you know something's not right, Because in my mind as a young kid, I could tell man, you know, the way I was processing things wasn't right. I mean, I suffered from severe toxic stress. And that was one of the big reasons why I started, you know, I had a learning disability. My focus in life was way off. I was afraid. I was afraid of everything. And when you have that kind of foundation growing up, and that's where you start life at, is being beat, being abused and also working all nights at a skating rink, not going to school, and you have a guy who's an alcoholic, and the second he got drunk, he got mad. And so our house lived in fear. Yeah. And the one thing that you can't ever get out of a kid's mind is your mom's mom, like. Like your mom's face.

The terror.

The terror of your mom's face. So, you know, you know, I didn't care about my brother. I didn't care about me. But I saw this woman go from Mary Poppins, the sweetest person on the planet Earth, and when you see your mom start to transform to a shell, to a person whose face becomes stoic, a person who has no emotion, and that changes a kid.

Yeah.

And when you're young and you have to grow up so fast, so about eight years old, my mind was of a of a 40 year old at eight. You know, my family, like, life came at me and it makes your brain, you know, you're not outside playing with kids. You know, you're trying to avoid getting beat. Yeah. You know, you're avoiding all these things.

Yeah, yeah. When you go home, it's supposed to be safe.

Right.

And you're gonna beat again.

Exactly. And what's funny about that, we lived on Paradise Road. Yeah. We lived on Paradise Road and it wasn't so paradise. No. It was anything but paradise, man. You know, once those doors shut, Yeah. You know, my dad gave everybody a different view of him.

He wore the nice tailored suits.

He smiled. That's right. Your dad's amazing. Those doors shut, man, and the devil himself came out. So it was rough. And that's why my foundation was so beaten down at a young age. So learning disability, I grew up dyslexic.

So I can relate to that. I'm just like constantly feeling stupid and insecure.

Right.

You know, I had a tutor my entire life. Horrible. Until I finished college, I had a tutor. Right. Second grade reading level when I I was in eighth grade. It was just like a constant struggle emotionally. And I took that outlet into sports and said, I'm gonna just train myself to be the best I can be in a place where I can learn something differently and pick up a different skill. But with your learning disability, with your dad beating you, screaming at you, emotionally challenging your mind with the racism you dealt with, with the different struggles you felt, with bullies. What was the hardest obstacle to overcome from up until about 1516?

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

What were you saying to yourself?

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

Yeah.

You know, with kids who can't learn. Right. Then it was confirmed what my dad was saying. So that confirmed it. Then I started cheating. So I started realizing, you know what? I'm taking the easy way out again. And it started snowballing from there. Now the kids are calling me nigger. But it wasn't all the kids. So what happens is you start to get this picture that everybody hates you because your reality becomes so big that you can't see the clear picture.

It might have been three or four kids.

That's it.

Doing it over and over.

Right. But it was the whole town. Yeah. Everybody hated me.

So the world hates me.

That's right. Yeah. And that's when it, that's when it became toxic. And that is where I became my worst enemy. Wow.

So those are the conversations.

Those are the conversations.

When did you start to realize that those conversations weren't supporting your life?

I was a. So my mom was getting ready to get married and. this guy came into our lives, his name is Wilmoth. He came into our lives and like I always say, whenever my life's getting better, God will put another challenge in front of me. He gets murdered.

Oh man.

And we moved back to Brazil. So we moved from this town, this small town in Brazil and we moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. A lot more blacks, a lot more different colors.

Yeah. Weren't you living in New York at some point too?

I was born in Buffalo, New York. Yeah, that's right. Okay. And I went from Buffalo to Indiana and then from Indiana to Indianapolis, Indiana. Indianapolis, Indiana. You know, he got murdered when I was in Indianapolis. We went back to Brazil. We went back to Brazil. This is when the racism started. Really? Because now I'm 16. So when I was first in Brazil, I was eight and nine. Kids don't care. Yeah. Here's the kid. I look different, but kids don't care. Yeah. Kids don't know. But when I moved and I came back, I'm no longer a kid. So all the kids I grew up with, I'm now different. I'm different. So there's about five black kids in my school. And the reality came when I came out one day and on my car was spray painted, nigga were gonna kill you. Oh my gosh. In Brazil? In Brazil. In Portuguese. No, no, my fault.

Brazil-Indiana. Oh gosh.

Yeah, my fault.

Brazil-Indiana.

I was like, oh, well you went to Brazil.

No, no, no. I was like, no, no, Brazil-Indiana. Brazil-Indiana.

Yes, from Brazil-Indiana to Brazil-Indiana. so I was in Brazil, Indiana.