David Goggins & Jocko Willink Reveal How To NEVER BE LAZY Again! | Lewis Howes
In this segment of the interview, David Goggins explains the concept of the "Gargons"—a self‑crafted, resilient persona he built to replace his former weak self. He stresses that this identity is not innate but deliberately created, and warns against letting it die when comfort sets in. Goggins rejects external labels that excuse effort, insisting that true change comes from personal responsibility, not from family, schools, or special circumstances. He describes his daily regimen of extreme discomfort: waking early to run for an hour‑and‑a‑half, followed by extensive gym work and two to three hours of nightly stretching, a routine he has missed only twice in over five years. He frames his performance level as living in the 90‑99% potential range, arguing that operating at such intensity is uncomfortable but essential. Finally, he outlines a philosophy of controlling the immediate, three‑foot world—focusing on what can be managed in the moment to build certainty and mental armor.
Chapters
I used to tell people lies so they would like me. Because I was so insecure. When you start to build yourself up and start to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence. Real, authentic.
What did I learn from whatever thing I'm looking at that I know I could have done a better job, could have done different? Sure, there's a million things like that. But I don't sit there and think about them all day long. What I think is like, think about.
Yourself, man, because you're leaving so much on the for the possibilities of what you can be.
You're 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 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.
Mm-.
He wanted to keep you down low. So when you're growing up with all this stuff, all this hate, and it wasn't the beatings. I could hit 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.
Yeah.
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 times.
That's it.
Doing it over and over.
Right, but it was the whole town. Everybody hated me.
So, the world hates me.
That's right. And 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 Wilmuth. 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. 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? 'Cause now I'm 16. So when I was first in Brazil, I was eight and nine. Kids don't care. Here's the kid. I look different, but kids don't care. 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 all my car was spray painted, nigger 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, I was like, oh, you went to Brazil?
No, no, Brazil, Indiana. Brazil, Indiana. Yes, from Indianapolis to Brazil, Indiana. Got it. So I was in Brazil, Indiana, and about 10 minutes from Brazil, Indiana is a small town called Center Point, Indiana. Uh-huh. And Center Point, Indiana is, was at that time, a huge hub of the KKK.
Wow.
In 1995, the Klan marched in the Fourth of July parade. And I don't know if the picture is in, I don't know if any pictures are in there, but if not, there's a picture in the book in 1995, 10 minutes from my house of crosses being burnt.
10 minutes from your house.
10 minutes from my house. Wow. So when you have all this negativity growing up and now you're cheating and you're doing this and your dad beats you and, you know, you're, you're Mama's fiance gets murdered and tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. And then you come to this and your mom's working three jobs. You know, she's not home at all. She never saw one report card of mine. She didn't know how bad off I was in school. She was hustling trying to make money. And I was the man of the house, lying, sneaking around, not going to school, cheating, right, everything I could.
Yeah.
And so, I walked out of school one day and saw this nigger was gonna kill you on my car. And I went in to get the principal. There's several incidents like this to happen. I went to get the principal and the principal, he didn't have anything, he couldn't give me any advice. And I went to my mom about it, 'cause my mom was already bothered by my dad beating her down and now her fiance got murdered.
So I didn't wanna go to her mom.
The last thing on her mind. Yeah.
She's like, I've dealt with this my whole life. Right. I didn't wanna bother with anything, man. So I kept everything away from her. So I'm in the crowd, watching trying to scrub this stuff off, and I got home and so happens two weeks later, she gets a note from school. And the note says, you, son is going to fail. He's not gonna graduate. And she's like, what is this? And I had to come clean with my mom of all the years of me cheating, of all the bullying, of all this and all that. And she was such in a bad spot in her life, that the best thing she could do was like, hey, you're going to fail. You're going to fail school.
Wow.
And I was like, my God, man. She was in a dark place. And I was in a dark place. And we were kind of on our own in the same house, but living different lives. And I realized at this time in my life, she was a great mom, but I was on my own. And that's when a real big change happened for me. So I said, I'm gonna join the military.
This is 6/17?
17, 18. I wanted to go into the delayed entry program. And I went to take the ASVAB test and I cheated. That's what you knew.
That's what I did.
You're good.
So I got my friend, 'cause I walked into recruiter's office and recruiter says, Hey, you gotta take this ASVAB test. Second I heard the test, I was like, man, oh, hang on a second. I can't test in my life, man. I'm gonna go, can I come back tomorrow? Yeah, yeah. So I come back and the recruiter starts handing these tests out. I'm like, great, I'm gonna sit with my boy, I'm gonna copy off my boy. He had a different test than I did.
Ooh.
So I couldn't copy off him. And that's when the light bulb hit on. So I failed this test several times. Did you fail it twice or three? I actually failed it twice. And the third time I said, Mom, I need help. Wow. And she said, We don't have much money, but we can afford a tutor. for one hour a week for six months, 'cause this is my last time taking the test. And so I had to learn. So I had a third grade reading level. I'm a junior in high school. So I had six months to learn all this stuff. And I only had a tutor for one hour a week. So basically what happened was she would come in for an hour and I wasn't picking it up, any of it. I just couldn't retain anything. And it was so much to learn that overwhelmed me. So basically what happened was I realized I had to go by the store and buy spiral notebooks. And I had to literally write down every single thing repeatedly. Like, so what may take you an hour to learn, it took me hours, 6, 8, 9, 10 hours, I had to write the same thing down. Simple stuff. Simple stuff.
I hear you, man.
So I started memorizing.
Yeah. That's my life.
So I had to memorize.
Yeah.
So I didn't really learn it. I could just recall it from writing it down so many times on page 71. I remember seeing that.
Yeah.
And that's how I did it. And I ended up passing that test.
Crazy.
And I got in the military.
So.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
What was the greatest lesson your mom taught you growing up?
Honestly, the greatest lesson she ever taught me is a lesson that she doesn't know how much she taught me because she wasn't much in the teaching mode. My dad took her soul. But what I did as a young kid is I observed everybody. I wasn't really smart in the books, but I was real smart when it came to life. And I was able to sit back and watch her mistakes. I was able to see how she struggled through life and how I don't want to struggle through life. And I was able to see, she never picked me up. The biggest thing she did for me, and this is honest to God truth, and she doesn't even know she did it, When I would bust my ass, when I would fail, when I was at the bottom of the sewer, she never picked me up. She never gave me that cookie and said, Hey son, you know, let's go be okay. She didn't have time for that. And sometimes she gets upset when I talk about my past because it paints her out to be not the best mom. If I had any kind of mom in that kind of environment, I would have never made it. Mm-. Because she forced me for whatever reason, she forced me to you better figure this out or you're going to be a statistic.
Wow.
And this is something that she didn't sit down and tell me. I realized this, this is the world that is in front of me. And what most people do is they see this world and they look at it as an excuse to get out of it.
Yeah.
I started looking at it as this is the ultimate training ground for the rest of my life. I have all these valuable lessons, 'cause if you look out in the world right now today, it's not a nice place, but I'm very prepared for it.
Yeah, you are.
I'm prepared for it. I'm prepared for all the failure coming my way. I'm prepared for everything my way. And that's the biggest lesson that she taught me by not teaching me, by never saying, It's gonna be okay. Matter of fact, she told me the exact opposite. Life sucks. That's what she knew. There was the truth.
That was her reality.
That was her reality.
Yeah.
And so I saw that. And so I started at that point in my life, I have a lot more failures, as you see in that book, but I started down the road of instead of the path of, you know, least resistance, I started choosing the path of most resistance to prepare myself for the journey that was coming my way.
Wow. And most kids don't prepare themselves for the most resistance. They want to get out of things.
They want to get out of things.
Get off the hook.
Right.
Put in the extra reps.
Right.
They went the easiest path to get to the top.
Right.
Exactly.
Huh.
You know, I look at my life as like, and here you talk about like really diving into pain and like embracing pain and finding, looking for the pain. Right. And I think there's like a, there's a, there's a safe pain and then there's probably an unsafe pain of just like jumping off a building and you know, whatever. Right. Trying to land on 20 floors or something, it's probably out the safe way to do things.
No.
But doing 200 miles of endurance running is like a different way of pain, looking at pain. And that's what I've been looking for my whole life is like finding the pain and I talk about like do something every day that's painful.
Right.
In that good structured environment. You've been doing that for the last couple of years now. It's like you work out every day, you haven't missed a day.
Been doing it for the last 20 years. 20 years?
20 years or 20 some years?
No, 20 some years of my life.
20 every day you work out.
So I used to take one day off a week. I used to take one day off a week.
For the body to recover, right? Makes sense.
But that one day off was an active recovery day where I would get on a trainer and ride for like two hours.
Wow.
But at a zone one heart rate, very low heart rate, and I replaced the carbohydrates in my body while I rode because the best way to recover for me is to do something at a very low heart rate, 'cause therefore your blood's flowing through your body. As your blood's flowing through your body, refuel it with the nutrients. Because then your blood's flowing, the nutrients is going through all your cells in your body. All that glycogen is now flowing at a low heart rate. So it's not burning it, it's refueling it. So every Sunday used to be that. And it kind of snowballed into, as human beings, we believe, like so many people, before I give them a workout plan, they're talking about recovery. Everybody that hears me speak, they want to go straight to recovery. Work out first. Work out first. Before you talk to me about recovery.
How to recover, yeah.
Work out first. We are always looking for, like whenever I talk to people, people take my words and they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable. This guy, you know, they want to put you in a box. They want to put a title on you. No, you're putting a title on me to make yourself feel better about yourself. If you read this book of mine, you see where I came from. This portion was not built. This portion was not made by God. This portion, sorry, this portion was built. I made this person. I made this person by diving in to the insecurities that life gave me. 'Cause now they're yours. They're yours to own. If you're not smart, call yourself dumb. It's okay, 'cause you are. But take that knowledge, putting yourself down. If you're fat, call yourself fat.
I used to be 300 pounds.
We want to talk so soft to ourselves. We're looking for that recovery day. And that recovery day is everything in your life. Everything in your life is a recovery day. We're looking for it. It's not coming. It's not coming. Get over that recovery day. And that's the mentality I took with me. And what happened through that process was all the frivolous things of life started to float away. I used to tell people lies so they would like me. Because I was so insecure. When you start to build yourself up and start to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence.
Yep.
Real Authentic confidence from hard work. Everything else goes away. You no longer look to other people for your self-esteem.
That's right.
You now know. I walk in the room now and I know the hours and years and decades I put into David Goggins. That's something, it's not on the wall. It's not a trophy on the wall. It's not a medal around your neck. It is actually a feeling in your heart and people go, why don't you ever smile? I don't have to.
Yeah.
Yeah, I do have a stoic look on my face. I'm a very focused person. But the feeling I have in my soul and in my heart, that's why I don't need to smile. I don't need to smile. I don't need you to look at me and say, oh my God, you look happy. Because half of us aren't happy. We're giving you something that we think you want to see. I don't do that anymore. I don't care how you perceive David Goggins. Because through my journey, I figured out the one piece I was missing. I thought it was cars. I thought it was women. I thought it was money. I thought it was everything. The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. And once you do that on a daily basis, it's not about the running. People's gonna be like, you're not working out. Where I got my work ethic from was the hours I had to spend learning this. When you sit down and you're not smart, and you have a disability, and you still want to be at the top of your class, I didn't want to just get by. When I realized that I can learn through hard work, and I can beat the valedictorian in school, but I got put in 10 hours more a day than he does. You know what kind of strength comes from that? When you're sitting down that guy, that valedictorian, studying for an hour, and you know I caught you, I caught you, And I am dumb, but I have the work ethic to catch you. That's where David Goggins got really invented. Yeah. Was at a kitchen table with 20 spiral notebooks that were empty. And then three months later, they were full. And when you can go through that, I still have them in my storage unit, you go through these spiral notebooks of your life and you realize, this is how I learned. This is unbelievable. There's no miles. It's not about the miles. It's that having a discipline every day to say, for me to learn this one math problem, it's gonna take me 10 hours.
Wow.
And that's where it... And you realize.
Through hard work.
You can outwork anybody. No matter how badass they are. But that's the part people don't want to dive into.
Yeah. When someone's lacking confidence in themselves, what's the answer you would give them if they're like, how do I gain more confidence?
It starts with yourself, man. You gotta start diving into those things that you are afraid of. You don't gain confidence by going to the spot that makes you feel good. It's gonna be a false reality. And the second life gives you that challenge, all you wanna do is go back to what made you confidence or what gave you confidence. Is that happy spot.
No.
What gives you confidence? What gave me confidence was spending years at a kitchen table trying to learn how to read and write on my own, realizing I can't learn the way you learn. I can't, but I can learn. What gives you confidence not being afraid is overcoming the fear. I used to stutter severely bad. So right now, I don't know how many people are gonna watch this. You know what gives me confidence? It's knowing I no longer care if I stutter or start stuttering to you. Yeah. That's what gives me confidence, is facing these things, overcoming them. And maybe not overcoming them every day, but facing them, and facing them and facing them pretty soon like this. You know what man, this is where it's at. It's not in that comfort zone. It's in the discomfort zone is where my confidence is getting built. That's where it's getting built. But people want to, they want an easier answer. There has to be an easier way. It's not. I'm sorry, I searched for it my entire life.
You- cheated.
I did.
You- lied.
I lied, I did everything. And I still felt empty. I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires, who call me on the phone and say, Man, I'm still missing something. It's because they did what they were good at. And they had this beautiful family, two, three houses, cars, everything. Has everything in the world on the outside looking in like, my God, man, how can you be unhappy? I walk around with a backpack with all my stuff in it, no car. And I walk around happiest person in the world. Have nothing, happy as hell. It's because I found out the whole key to life. It's not in all that. You have to face yourself. So many people live to be 100 years old and they die miserable, having everything. because they never examined. I call it my live autopsy. You never examine this.
What did you learn when you took on that leadership role? Because I'm assuming you weren't leading teams your first two years as a Navy SEAL, but then the more you were in the program, you were then leading groups of guys for many years, right?
Yeah.
What was the biggest challenge for you from going as a, I wouldn't say a follower, but as a team member into then transitioning into a leadership role of leading the team? What was the biggest challenge for you from that transition? From team member to player to player coach, let's say.
Yeah, well you actually, you're like not wanting to be to call me a follower. Well, when you get into the SEAL teams and you're a new guy, you're absolutely following. You don't know what you're doing. you don't understand the tactics. And so there's other people that have experience, you're listening to them, they're teaching you. And then as I got older and more experienced, and eventually I did move into leadership positions and became an officer in the SEAL teams. And then it was my time to step up and lead. And the amount of lessons that I learned are countless. And that's what I ended up writing a bunch of books about. I ended up writing a bunch of books about those leadership experiences that I had.
Right out of the gate, you know.
When you ask me what I learned, you know, one of the most important things that I talk about all the time is you're gonna get humbled and you need to be humble. Because you don't have a leader. Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah.
As a leader, especially you step up into a leadership position, do you know everything?
No.
No, you don't know everything. If you act like you know everything, you're gonna get eaten alive.
Humbled quickly.
You're gonna get humbled and not only that, but your troops are gonna look at you and say, why are you... Who do you think we are? Do you think we're stupid? So you're acting like you know everything. We actually know you don't know everything and you're acting that way. So you're their respect for you goes down. Whereas if you just say, Hey, look, I just got into this job. I'm going to do the best I can. I don't know everything. My mind is open. I'm here to listen. I'm here to learn. And if you guys can help me out, I'd appreciate it. Well, everyone sees you as a humble person that's ready to listen and ready to learn. And the respect for you actually goes up. So I'm not saying you can, walk in and say, hey, I don't know anything. I'm ignorant. I haven't done any preparation. I haven't studied anything. I don't know anything about my job. But you can only learn so much from books and from. From various documents.
Right.
Eventually you got to start doing it. So you gotta. That's what I learned. Number one, you got to be humble.
Yeah. How long. How long were you a. A leader of the team of teams?
So I was enlisted. in the SEAL teams for my first eight years. And then I got a commission and became a SEAL officer.
Okay. And how many years were you an officer for?
12 years.
12 years.
What.
What was the most humbling experience you had as a leader in all 12 years? And was the 11th and 12th year easier than the first and second year as a team leader?
So most humbling experience. There's, well, the most humbling experience you're going to experience on the battlefield is if you have your guys wounded or killed.
Yeah.
And when that happens, there's nothing that's going to be worse than that for you as a person.
Right.
Because you feel responsible, you feel like it was your job.
It's not just you feel responsible, you are responsible.
Yeah.
You are in charge. And so when someone gets wounded or killed, you, there's, if you're not shouldering that burden, Then you're lying to yourself. So that's number one. The story that I wrote about in Extreme Ownership, the opening chapter of Extreme Ownership, is there was a blue on blue, a fratricide, meaning friendly forces killing friendly forces. And that happened when I was on a mission. It was actually a group of my SEALs with some Army soldiers and some Iraqi soldiers in a position And in a sniper position. And they got basically attacked by a friendly Iraqi element.
And guys did.
Yes, got into a gunfight with them. One of my guys killed an Iraqi soldier, wounded a couple more Iraqi soldiers, one of my guys got wounded. It was a nightmare. 'Cause it's hard.
You're on the same side. You're on the same team.
Yes. Yes. So, and I was the guy in charge.
Wow.
So, you want to talk about humbling? That's humbling. You think you're so good, you think you've got tactics mastered and all that stuff, you think you're great at planning and all those things. And I wouldn't say that I thought that, but I definitely thought I was competent. And so when that unfolded, it's like, oh, guess whose fault this is? It's my fault.
Wow.
Where do you go after that? How do you go back to a competent place of being able to lead people 'Cause you've got to have some confidence too. You can't just be concerned that something wrong is gonna happen all the time, right? How do you transition back into a competent place?
Number one, take ownership of what went wrong. Extreme ownership. Take extreme ownership of it, right? 'Cause it's the same thing I just said. If that would have happened and I would have said, Hey guys, that was my fault, it was his fault and his fault and his fault, people would have looked at me, they know the truth. The truth is I'm the guy in charge. So everyone's respect level for me would have gone down. and their confidence in me would have gone down. But when I go in and say, Hey guys, look, this is what went wrong. This is my fault because I'm the guy in charge and this is what we're going to do to fix it. Well, now everyone says, okay, well, he's taking ownership of the problem and he's actually got some good solutions to make sure this doesn't happen again. Their confidence and the respect for me.
Goes up and we can move forward.
Right.
How often did you have to take.
Extreme ownership every single day?
Every day.
Oh, yeah. Of course.
Wow.
Of course. The minute that you're blaming anyone else for things that are going wrong, the moment that you do that, think about what it does to you. Think about what it does to you. If I'm walking, if we go on a mission and something goes wrong and I go, that wasn't my fault. Well, what am I doing to fix it now? What am I doing? I'm not doing anything.
Nothing.
Just blaming people. Because I don't think it's my fault. So I'm not going to change anything. Well, then we'll make that same mistake again. Then I'll say that wasn't my fault.
And we'll never make any progress.
Whereas if I say, hey, this was my fault, here's what I'm gonna do to fix it, then we fix the problem. And by the way, when I put my finger at you and I say, hey, you know, this was your fault, what's your reaction to that? Defensiveness. Yeah, you're gonna get defensive. Yeah, of course.
And then what are you gonna do? No, it wasn't. I'm playing with this person, that's their fault.
They dropped the ball here, Jimmy did that, Johnny did this. And what are they all gonna do? Point it back to you. So now what do we end up with?
We end up with no solution.
No one taking ownership of any of the problems. The problems never get solved. We never progress.
So how many times did you take extreme ownership of something that technically wasn't your fault?
There is no thing.
There is no thing.
There is no thing.
So you'll take ownership of everything. Even if it wasn't directly.
This is a question, a comment that I get from my consulting business, right? You know, we work with business leaders. and someone will say, yeah, I get it, you know, but what should I do when it's really not my fault?
But it is your fault.
It's like, oh yeah, I have yet to have somebody stump me with a question when I say, no, if you're in charge of something and something goes wrong, it's your fault.
It's all your responsibility.
It's all your responsibility. Because if I'm in charge of a platoon and one of the machine gunners that's four or five levels below me in the chain of command and is on a position that I'm not even at. And he shoots his machine gun in the wrong direction. Towards friendly forces. Whose fault is that?
It's your fault.
Yes, it's my fault. I didn't train him well enough. I didn't make sure he understood his fields of fire where he was allowed to shoot. I didn't make sure that he was being monitored correctly by his fire team leader to make sure that they all knew what was happening. And at the end of the line, if he's not competent and capable of doing his job, It's my fault that I let him be in that position. So no matter what happens, it's my fault.
So what do you tell CEOs or leaders of big companies that have multiple lines, you know, underneath them that don't have the time to train them personally, but they have someone underneath them to train who's training them, who's training them. How do you coach?
It's real easy. You know, the guy says to me, Hey, you know, we failed this project. and I said, oh, why do we fail that project? Oh, because of Bill, the front line manager. Oh, okay, who's in charge of Bill? It's Mike. Okay, who's in charge of Mike? Fred, who's in charge of Fred?
The leader, the CEO, yeah.
I am, yeah, that's right. You're in charge of Fred. So that means you need to make sure that your intent is felt all the way down through the chain of command.
How do we do that?
That'S leadership. This is why I have a consulting business. Because this is what you have to do. Because the larger a company gets, look when I'm in charge of eight people, it's easier. Everybody knows what I'm thinking. I mean, I see them every day. I can sit in one room and talk to them all face to face. On the battlefield, you're in charge of a fire team. A fire team has four or five people in it. Even in combat, you can control four or five people. Eight people, you actually can't control anymore. In a firefight, you can't control eight people. That's why the Army, the Marine Corps, around the whole world, it's like four or five people in a fire team. That's what the base unit is. In the corporate world, you can handle a little bit more than that because there's no explosions happening, there's no gunfire. So you can control eight people, ten people, something like that. That's kind of what the normal corporate structure breaks out as. But the bigger you get, the more you have to rely on those subordinate leaders to spread the word, to understand what the mission is, to understand what the end state is, to understand why they're doing what they're doing. That's what you have to do. as a leader. And when you do that, there was plenty of missions that I went on where I was the ground force commander in charge of 30 or 40 seals or 100 seals and Iraqi soldiers combined together. Plenty of operations like that. You know how many people I talked to? I would talk to three. I would talk to the two platoon commanders and the mobility commander.
Yeah.
And everybody. And then they would talk to their two or three people and then their people would talk to their two or three people.
So how do you get that message across to 100 or 1000s if that's in your organization?
There's a bunch of different ways. So in a big organization, this is something that we come across. I mean we work with companies, I think the biggest company we work with is 167,000 employees. 167,000 employees global, right? So they're all over the place. So how do you get the message? Well there's a bunch of things that you have to do. Number one, you have to make sure that your message is simple, clear and concise, right? You've got to communicate in a way that even that frontline trooper can understand what you're talking about. Now you have to translate that up and down the chain of command because if you're my chief operating officer, obviously the level of detail that I go into with you and the chief financial officer, that's going to be higher. We need to be in a deeper level of conversation and understanding, but I need to make sure that you know how to translate that down to your next level and then that person knows how to translate it down to their next level and all the way through the chain of command. There's companies where I'll go into the CEO and we'll be talking, I'll say, so how well does everyone understand what your mission is here? And they'll say, oh, absolutely. I'll go to a frontline person and say, what's the mission of this company? They have no idea. They have no idea. And this could be a real problem.
This could be a real problem.
I mean, obviously this can be a real problem, but it becomes a real problem when if you're a frontline troop and you don't understand what the mission is, you can make bad decisions on the front line. So there are certain companies at certain stages where the most important thing they can do is be cost effective, save money, right? And that's, if a frontline troop needs to make a decision about, hey, should I redo this thing right now, which is gonna cost us a little bit more money, or should I just let it go with a little bit lower standard? Well, if what you're focused on is saving money, that guy says, okay, you know what, I'm gonna let this go even though the standard's a little bit lower. That's a decision that can get made. But what if your focus right now, maybe you got some bad reviews from consumers and so your focus is to make quality perfect even if you have to expend a little bit more money. If the frontline troop knows that, he goes, wait a second, this isn't quite where we want it. So he redoes it, it costs a little bit more money, but we're now achieving the mission at that time. And guess what? As you can probably figure out, the mission changes because we will work with a company where what are they trying to do right now? They're trying to maximize profits for this quarter because they're going public and they need four quarters in a row or six quarters in a row where they see that increasing. So, okay, guess what kind of decisions they're making. Now, can you go too far with that? Absolutely. And now you get the frontline truth that goes, hey, I don't care. I'll put out as many as I possibly can. It's going to be dirt cheap and I saved the company a bunch of money. But now we end up with bad quality out there and we will get a bad reputation and that'll hurt us strategically.
Right.
So how do you get that message out there?
You have to, number one, make sure it's simple.
And then you communicate it. What's a simple message for like a, I guess it depends on the company, but it depends on the company.
Yeah.
Should a simple message be like one.
Sentence, you mean, or should it be simple to understand? Simple to understand.
Yeah.
The more, and what we'll do with companies is we'll do a drill. We'll work on their mission. It's kind of their mission statement, but then also their mantra or maybe a couple mantras where, you know, In this case, hey, it's quality over quantity. And now a frontline person's making decisions based on that. And so there's a couple of mantras, two, three mantras that the people can refer back to that helps them guide their decision making process. And then on top of that they have a little bit more detailed mission statement where they can say, wait a second, I know the mantra says this, but it also says we're supposed to take care of our customers. And if I let this go, then my customers won't be taken care of. I need to adjust a little bit.
What would you say is your mission and the mantras you use for your business brand?
So I have a bunch of different businesses. For Echelon Front, our consulting business, our mission is to be the premier organization for leadership consultancy in the world. That's what we're trying to do. And we're doing great at it. We're doing great at it. How do we do that? What are the mantras? well, number one, like you just, like we just said, what do we want to do? We want to make our clients and customers happy. How do we do that? We provide them great service and we actually improve their game. We actually can look at their metrics and say, Hey, look, we're glad you brought us on board. Here's what we said we were going to do and here's how it works. So that's, and one of the other things that we say is, look, we don't want to be a permanent crutch that people have to rely on. So a lot of consultant companies, consultancies, they want to go in and hook into a company for an extended period of time and we don't want to do that. We want to work with you for six months, 12 months, 18 months, depending on the size of the company.
And let you go.
We do have some companies that are growing rapidly and so what we do is we, as they acquire new companies or as they bring in lots of new people, we are there to help train them and kind of onboard them. So that has turned into some longer term contracts, but that's one of the mantras is we don't want to be embedded with you forever. If we're with you for too long, we failed.
Yeah.
Okay.
So those are the kind of things we do.
And what about your personal mission with the content you do and all the books? Is there a mission there that you have as well?
I'm trying to take the lessons that I was lucky enough to learn and get them to as many people as I can so they don't have to suffer through the same mistakes that I made.
Yeah.
What would you say is your biggest insecurity? Do you have any insecurities?
My biggest insecurity.
Because from the outside looking in, you feel like it seems like you have no fear. You're extremely successful in business. Everything you put out is really successful. You've been through. 20 years of training and combat. You've seen the worst in the world. You've seen the best. And it doesn't seem like you have many insecurities. So I'm just curious if you face any today after all the lessons you've gone through.
Yeah, I mean, I would say like anybody else, I don't want to fail at things.
Yeah.
And for me, like I said, if there's people out there that could use the lessons that I've learned and I haven't gotten it to them, To me, that's a failure.
So.
That'S the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. The other thing from that perspective is, you look at, you say, you've seen a lot, you've been through a lot, and I have, I've been through a decent amount. There's many, many people that have been through infinitely worse than me, but for what? I'm insecure about for what I worry about is I worry about missing out on opportunities that I have because I got friends that will never get the chance to execute on opportunities because they didn't come home. And so for me to squander any moment, any second of my life, my life is a gift, your life is a gift, I know that for a fact. and for me to squander that is something that definitely haunts me. It haunts me every day and I won't let it happen.
Yeah, because I'm assuming you got a lot of friends that didn't make it back or people you were with or trained or... Yeah, all the above. So do you feel like you have this responsibility to make sure you take on every opportunity or the opportunities that come to you, you've gotta at least give them your best shot, even if you kind of fail at it.
Well, yeah, I mean, there's a, there's.
A.
What you just said, I mean, even you know as you said it, it's an unrealistic statement. Hey, every opportunity that comes your way, I'm gonna take on. No, that's not true. Every opportunity that I have, prioritize and execute, you know, which is one of the laws of combat. It's like, hey, you're gonna get opportunities, but I'm gonna look at them, assess them, and move forward. But really, I'm talking about the real things that I'm trying to do that I have the opportunity to do, I'm going to do them to the best of my ability.
Yeah.
Is there anything you regret in your 20 years of being a SEAL?
I mean, you're always going to have regret.
Is there anything that you still hold on to, that you haven't processed and let go of or been okay with? I guess, like, the regrets that you've dealt with.
You know, I don't spend a lot of time with regret.
That's good.
You know, because 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? What did I learn from whatever thing I'm looking at that I know I could have done a better job, could have done different. Sure, there's a million things like that. But I don't sit there and think about them all day long. What I think is like, hey, here's the lessons that I learned from them. I won't make those mistakes again and move forward.
-Yeah. Was it challenging because you have four kids?
-Four kids.
Four kids. Was it challenging at times being a father and going off to war and thinking about kids and missing out on kids, was that challenging for you? Or did you know this is what I signed up for and it's all gonna be okay, I'm gonna come home eventually and spend more quality time with them? Or did you struggle with being a father and being away? a lot at the same time. Yeah.
When you have kids and you go away to war and you don't know if you're going to come back, that's horrible.
How do you handle that emotionally or mentally?
I think I did a lot of compartmentalization.
Really?
And so, like, here's a, for instance, I was in Ramadi, my last deployment to Iraq, and my wife asked me to send a picture of where I slept at night because My kids said, oh, the kids want to see where we were sleeping. We were in an old regime kind of palace on the wall. Not quite a palace, but a mansion. And of course it's all now boarded up and there's sandbags and windows and their machine gun nests on it and the whole nine yards. But that's where we were living, you know? And I had a little bedroom in there with a plywood bed that, you know, we built and there was some kind of a crappy mattress on it. A little cushion. Yeah, but that's where I slept. And so, I was going to take a picture of it so I could send it to my wife on an email. And when I took the picture, I looked at it and I realized that there was something wrong with the picture. So, I opened up a drawer, pulled out a little file, a little folder, took some pictures of my wife and kids and put them up around the bed.
-Wow.
-And then I took picture of it and then I took all those things back down. I put them back in the folder, I put them back in the drawer. because the last thing I needed to be thinking about while I was away on deployment was thinking about my wife and kids. What I needed to be thinking about was the guys that were with me that were counting on me to make the right decisions. And so I didn't want to be thinking about my wife and kids. So I compartmentalized them. I would talk to my wife maybe once a week, call her, check in. I would tell her everything's great, everything's fine. And she would tell me the same thing. you know, it doesn't matter what was going on at home as far as.
She was worried about her.
She didn't want me worrying about her or the kids. So as far as I knew, everything was good and as far as she knew, everything was good and that was what seemed to work well.
Wow. Did they teach you that or is that what a lot of SEALs did or is that just kind of, kind of, I had to.
I think some, and not just SEALs, but I think most human beings will figure that that's probably the best thing to do is focus on your job at hand and put those thoughts and feelings aside. But I'll tell you what, you know, you talked about being scared and I said, you know, for me being scared of one of my guys getting hurt, the last thing in the world I wanted to be thinking about while I was on deployment was my wife and kids at home and would I ever see him again or any of that. I'm not thinking about that. That's not happening.
Then you're making the wrong moves.
Yeah, 'cause then what you're doing is you're hesitating. And if you're hesitating, that's when you get hurt, you're gonna get hurt, you're gonna get killed.
What's your biggest insecurity today?
Not to be arrogant, I don't have one.
What was the last one you had? And when was that?
The last one I had was probably, Still me. Me, still living, because I always talk about, I pay rent. So we used to live in a $7 a month place when I was growing up. This is in Buffalo or is this in Indiana? So we had a lot of money in Buffalo. And when my mom left, my dad, we went to nothing for a period of time before she got on her feet. And that $7 a month, place used to be, it was my, it was who I was. I was no one. I was in the sewer. My mom wasn't there. I had nothing. And you always feel like you have nothing. I had achieved so much. I was a Navy SEAL. I had gone through Ranger School. I've gone through Delta Force selection training. I've done so much. I run 200 miles, pull-up records, everything. learned to read and write, became pretty intelligent. And I still was like, man, what is wrong with me? It wasn't until I got real sick. And I talked about in the last chapter of that book, I got real sick. And I was about 38 years old. I'm 43 now. And my life got real quiet. I went from running 205 miles in 39 hours to I couldn't get out of bed. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, but once again, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Why is that? In that moment, when my whole life changed, I went from a guy who worked out every day, trained every day, to a guy who couldn't get out of bed. My life was taken from me. The one thing that kept me going was my training. Now you didn't have that. I didn't have anything.
Now you just had to sit alone.
Alone. And not train. And that's what changed me. And that's when I realized I hadn't thought, hadn't taken time to think about what I had done in my life.
You hadn't reflected yet.
I hadn't reflected. I'd done all these things, but there was no finish line. I still believe that, but you must have time to reflect. I was just going. I wouldn't even, I finished a race of life, and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I'd go on.
You're like, on to the next.
I get in the car and I go.
You won't even take the medal?
Gone. don't care about.
Like, I'm not gonna waste an hour.
Sitting around for this ceremony. Most people sit around and that's what they like. Yeah, they.
They need the ceremony.
If I accomplish something, validation.
I haven't done anything.
Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Just getting started. I'm just getting started. It's right. When I started figuring out life that I was leaving so much in the tank. I caught my 40 rule. Yeah, I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man, I was this dumb, fat kid being bullied. And now I'm a 180 pound person who lost 106 pounds in less than three months. Learn to read, learn to do this, learn to do that. I was like, I need more. I was fueling my mind with everything. I never took time to say, My God, you came from this hell and you're here. So those insecurities, and this is how I explain it the best way, SEAL training became pretty hard and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL PEP prep program. Like a boot camp for the boot camp.
That's right.
And it was two months. In my last two years before I retired from the military, they sent me there to train these kids. Wow. To get ready for the SEALs.
18, 19, 20 year olds, yeah.
Young kids.
So when they get to Navy SEAL training, man, they were physical studs. They were running, swimming. I mean, they were hybrids. Wow. But they get the buds and the same amount of people would quit.
Why is that?
This is why. We were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters.
Hmm. It's not about... Not the mind.
That's right. We weren't diving into the sewer. Everybody's got a story. We don't share it on social media. We share our nice life on social media. We all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine.
Yeah.
Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I want to talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys' minds. I wasn't building that so-called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week, it would draw on something that made them very insecure and they look for comfort. Whenever hardness comes, and you don't know what it is, it may be different for you than it is for me, but you go back to your insecurities and then you go back to insecurities, you then look for comfort within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you when you were sad, when you were sick. We look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort. It's in those moments you must retrain your mind to think differently in hell. I wasn't training them to do that.
Why weren't you training them?
I wasn't training myself to it because at that time I was doing what I was told. These guys need to meet a standard.
Physical standard.
A physical standard. The physical standard is not what they need to meet. It's a mental standard you must meet in life. So going back to when I was sick, I was hitting the physical standards. I wasn't meeting the mental standard. The mental standard is you must know how far you've come. Wow. I had come 8,000 miles from where I started. But if you never know that, you're still in the $7 a month place. When I was sick, I was able to slow it down and reflect back on my entire life. And in that bed, when I thought I was dying, 'cause that story is long, that sick portion of my life is long, I didn't care if I died or lived. Wow. 'Cause I was for the first time in my life happy.
Wow.
And at peace. 'Cause I reflected back on where I started.
You said, well, I have come a long way.
That's right. And no one saved me. It wasn't like someone came down here and guided me through life. When you figure this out on your own, the amount of pride and dignity and self-respect you have, that's why I walk around the streets with a backpack and just like, I don't need anything else.
Yeah.
You figure it out by going inside yourself, by callousing over the victim's mentality. you're always a victim, even if you have everything in life until you realize what you've achieved. You have to first realize what you've achieved in my mom has accomplished so much in her life since my father, but she hasn't done that one step. Really?
She doesn't acknowledge it and reflect on it.
She continues to go back to the dungeon of her past life and live in that space. And live in that space versus living the space that she's in now and reflecting back on My God, this is what I've done with my life. So.
Have you talked to her about this?
We talk about it all the time. And you have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to really go there. Not surface. I don't live on the surface of anything. Surface is what got me where I was at. It got me from 175 pounds to 300 pounds. Telling everybody I'm good. I don't give a damn. I'm good. No, they're hollow words. A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do anymore. Everything that comes out of my mouth has substance. It's real. And we all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds, in our souls. I act on mine. A lot of us who are afraid of something, we allow our minds to choose the path of least resistance, so we go a different route. I'm afraid of something, it's telling me you must do this thing.
Do this thing.
You must do that.
Yeah.
You have to go that way. And most of us don't understand that mentality. We go left and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives. It's because we continue to take the journey that is mapped out. And how I look at it is I talk in life like a lot of us in life want to take the four-lane highway. that has road maps and all this other stuff on it, man. Tells you where to go, gas stations. The next 10 miles up, you're gonna see a McDonald's or Cracker Barrel. Yeah. It's the easy route.
Very few of us wanna go to the right side.
That Cracker Barrel's that Midwest life. That's right, that's right.
That's right. That's from Ohio. It's all about it, man. Indiana. Cracker Barrel everywhere. Dude, that's amazing. Bringing back memories. This is powerful, 'cause I've been telling people this. I've been living that way unknowingly my whole life of like whatever the thing is I'm afraid of. When I was in high school, I started doing those things.
Right.
And it's just like I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid.
Right.
So, I need to do the things that scare me the most. That's right. You know, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. Tiffany's heard me share these stories, but I was afraid to talk to girls when I was a teenager. I was afraid of dancing. I was afraid of like singing and playing music in front of people. I was afraid of all these different different things. And so, I said, I want to do this. I'm going to give myself a challenge every single day until the fear goes away. -That's right. -And I feel like that's what more of us should be doing.
I'm hearing that that's what you how.
You live your life. -That's all it is, man. -And it helps me feel so much more confident. When you overcome that fear. -Yeah.
-I'M saying this doesn't have control over me anymore. -That's right. -It's like you can be at so much more peace. -It's 100% in your life. -Like for instance, I never thought in my wildest dreams I could be a Navy SEAL. It's until you opened your mind, open-mindedness creates that. We all shut down our mind. Like for instance, when I broke the pull-up record, everybody around me who heard the pull-up record was 4,020 pull-ups. That's the first thing they did. Oh my God.
4,024 hours or was it 4,020?
Yeah, it's 4,020 pull-ups in 24 hour period. Yeah, yeah. The first thing I did versus closing my mind to like, oh my God, that's crazy. I went and got a pen and.
Say, how many is that every minute?
Exactly.
Every hour, every second.
Instead of taking life and making it out to be this grandiose thing, start breaking it down. Start breaking it down. And most of us, we live in a box and we don't want to go outside that box at all, ever. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. But we do is we shackle our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind that this is all I can do. This is all I'm good at. And we take away the possibilities of you could be this, you could be that, you could be all these things. And I never thought at 300 pounds I could be next to seal. So if my mind was shackled, me and you would never meet. There'd be no book. There'd be no book. There'd be nothing. So what people understand is that they live for themselves, not knowing that you have the power within yourself to change millions of lives by facing life, by facing yourself. And through that, I would die never knowing that I had the power to change millions of lives. It will haunt me the most. People ask me, what haunts you the most? What haunts me most is that if I were to die at 300 pounds, let's say I was 75 years old, I got to heaven and God has a chart like that on everybody's life. God knows all.
Let's say that.
I don't care what you believe in. Doesn't matter. I'm not judging anybody. Let's say my thing is God. You get to heaven, I'm 300 pounds, I sit down, I was a cockroach terminator my whole life, and we're sitting down just like this. You're God and I'm David. and he gives me that chart and he says, look at this. Now, look at this chart. And on the chart, it has all these different things, but my name's on it. But these things aren't me. I was gonna change the world. I was gonna. I was gonna set records. I was gonna be a Navy SEAL. I was gonna be all these things in the military that I accomplished. You're gonna get the VFW award. You could be honored here, honored there. I'm like, God, I was. This isn't me. Like it says, David Goggins. I was an Ecolab guy, I sprayed for cockroaches and I'm 300 pounds. I said, here, I'm 185. It says here, I got a bachelor's and a master's. It says all these things. And God goes, no, that's who you were supposed to be.
Wow.
My biggest fear in life is if there is a final resting place in this world. and there's a final judgment, and you talk to something much bigger than you. I don't want to sit down and have a conversation with someone with something that says, you,'re in heaven. This is what you should have been on earth. And are you really in heaven now or are you in hell? Thinking about how much I left on a table for fear, for not willing to go over the wall and over the next wall and over the next wall. So in my mind, I believe that and God knows all. At least I believe that. I want God to be up there right now as we're speaking, writing stuff down, saying, My God, he exceeded even my expectations. That's how I live my life. I now know that there is no cap on the human mind. There's no cap. We cap it ourselves.
Wow. Is there a cap on the human body?
That's right.
Is there one?
I don't believe so. Because one thing I found out was, 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 start climbing, I 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 CEO, Captain Bowen, looked at me, I'm on crutches, I'm all jacked up, he says, Hey, this is your last time you're going to go through BUDS. 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. They 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.
Not shin splints.
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 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 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 them, they're not broken like this. They may have some, you know, everybody's sick going through that training. But if I can graduate, it would change everything for me. If I can start the hardest train 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 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 three months later, my stress fractures were healed by running on them.
It's calcifying it, just like.
I never had them since. I'm 43 years old.
Wow.
I ran 7,000 miles in 2007. Haven't had a stress fracture since. And I'm not saying to do that. I'm just saying that when the mind and the body connect and you don't give yourself a way out, the only way out for me at that time was death. Wow. I'm gonna be a Navy SEAL.
Or I'm gonna die.
Or I'm gonna die trying.
Yeah.
Period. And my body said, Roger that. We're gonna get you through this.
So when the mind gives it no way out, your body says, okay, okay, I believe you now.
I have to heal.
I'm gonna figure this out with you. We're gonna do this. It's gonna be the worst part of your life, but you're gonna survive.
We're gonna survive.
Wow.
And as you hear in that 100 mile race I did, I started figuring out more and more and more and more about at the other end of suffering is a life that no one, and I'm not talking about go out there and kill yourself. Don't take these words and flip them and say, oh my God, no. It just be uncomfortable. I call it suffering.
Don't physically injure yourself.
Yes. Not saying that.
And then be out for six months. That's right.
That's no good. That's no good. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying do what I did. I was in a spot that life forced me. I had a choice. I had a choice to be this guy or the guy that's in front of you. I had choices.
I chose this path. And you're still choosing it. I'm still choosing it.
You can go back to that guy any moment. Because I found out, I found out something with those stress fractures. I found out something. through facing all these things. I found out a whole other world, which is why I walk around with all my stuff in a black backpack. Wow. I found it a whole another way. A whole another way of 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. What that means is when you accomplish something in life, if you want to go back to scratch and go back to that seven dollar 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. 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.
That's right.
When you cheat so much, the friction is. It's minor. Because why? I'm sore. I'm gonna get a massage today.
I'm hungry.
I'm gonna eat today. The refrigerator is always full. So your Comforts are now. So your discomfort is now very minuscule to your discomfort back here in the seven dollar 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.
How do you manage your own ego with the success you get? You know, you've had success in multiple areas of your career from a seal to an author to a business leader to an executive coach and leadership coach. How do you manage it when you are training CEOs from companies that have a hundred thousand plus employees and you're number one on the list and top podcast? How do you manage it daily?
Because I've seen over and over again through my own experiences, through the books that I cover on my podcast, the books I've read in my life. If you want to open yourself up for a massive downfall, just let your ego get out of control.
Really?
If you want to let that happen, yeah, let your ego get out of control. So every single day for me, it starts at ground zero. I've got to go forward with an open mind, with a humble mind looking at the world. You know, it's classic. Like when I get asked a question, I don't think to myself, oh, I know the answer to this. And I get asked questions all the time.
Yeah.
And generally when I hear a question, 99% of the questions that I hear, I've heard in some form before. But I don't go, I've heard this before, I already know the answer. I say, okay, well let me hear this. What detail is this person talking about? What angle is this person coming at it from? What can I learn from this question? How can I assess this question? So everything that I look at, I try and look at from a humble perspective. And if you don't do that, it's going to be a problem. I mean, even when you're asking me questions about God, Right? You're asking me questions about my beliefs. It's like, Hey, here's my beliefs. I'm humble and I'm listening and my mind is open and this is what I've seen and this is what I can tell you about it. I'm not sitting here jumping up and down saying you should believe this or you should believe that. I'm saying you should stay humble. You should keep an open mind about what's going on in the world. I am. I think you should do the same thing.
Wow, how do you, how do you, so it's a mindset every morning you wake up with an open mind.
Yeah, and I don't want to get in this whole like morning routine where I go and look in the mirror and say be humble. No, I don't do that. Like I'm not, that's not, that's not me. But when, you know, you wake up and I'm just saying that the way I go about my business and my life is to say, say to myself, okay, well, I could be wrong about that. I could be wrong about this, you know. Wow. I mean, even the book that I wrote, Follow On to Extreme Ownership, the book is called the Dichotomy of Leadership. And what's interesting about this book, so the dichotomy of leadership is like, you can't be extreme in one direction or the other, right? You can't be, if you're in a leadership position, you can't talk all the time, right? Obviously, as a boss, you need to communicate, you need to talk to your people. But if you talk too much, guess what happens? People stop listening to you. You're putting out too much information. They don't know what's important and what's not. So that's bad. You can't go too far in that direction. The other direction is you can't not talk enough and now no one knows what's going on, no one knows what's happening. So you have to be balanced and that's the whole idea of the dichotomy of leadership. But probably the first dichotomy in leadership that I had to say to myself, you know what, there's another side to this is I used to tell the young SEAL officers, that you have to be aggressive. You got to be default aggressive. That's how you got to be. Because when something's going on, you got to be aggressive to make that, get that problem solved. And if you're not being aggressive, then you're hesitating.
Well, then you can get killed.
Okay, so there you go. And that's what I used to tell guys.
And as a, that's extreme.
That's an extreme. Yes. That's the problem with it. And so the question is, can you be too aggressive? Yes, absolutely. You can, hey, there's a machine gun nest over there. Let's attack it. So you charge up the hill and everyone dies.
Yeah.
You've been too aggressive. So what you have to do is you have to be balanced. And that's probably so even as I had these kind of mantras, like default aggressive, can you do too much of that? Yes, you can. So you end up with this, what do you end up with? Can you be too passive? Absolutely.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Well now we're not making any progress. Now we're getting crushed by the enemy because we didn't maneuver. Okay, so that's bad. So where do you want to be? You want to be balanced. Even the idea of extreme ownership. Can you take too much ownership? -Yes. -Yes, you can. Really? -Yes, you can.
-But I thought you said you need.
To take ownership of everything. 2 different things. Listen to this. If you're working for me and I say, okay, here's the mission that I want you to accomplish tonight. Here's the people I want you to take. Here's the weapons I want you to bring. Here's the vehicles I want you to bring. Here's the... Here's the route I want you to use to get to the the target, here's the method I want you to use to secure the target, here's the route I want you to do to get back. So that's the plan. Now you take ownership and go execute. Now can you really take ownership of that plan? If someone else gave you the whole thing? I mean, I gave you the whole thing, right? Is that your plan?
No, no.
It's your plan. It's my plan. So when you go in the field and now you come up against an obstacle and you're executing my plan, what's your attitude? Well, it's not my plan.
Yeah.
And you're at an obstacle now and you're like, Hey, Jocko didn't think of this. So now you just back away and you come back and you say, Hey, we failed the mission because you didn't think of this. You didn't think of this option. Yeah, yeah.
Right.
So that's me taking too much ownership. So what I need to do is I say, Hey, here's the plan or here's the mission. How do you want to do it? And now if you're a good leader, you'll go get with your people and you'll say, oh, hey guys, here's the plan or here's the mission that we have to how do you guys want to do it? Now you all come up with a good plan. You come back to me and you say, Here's the plan. And I say, that looks pretty good. Go execute. And now when you hit an obstacle.
In the field, what's your attitude? I need to adapt and adjust.
What's your plan? You'll make it work. You came up with this. Yes. So can you take too much ownership? The answer is yes, you can. So with just about every, you can.
Name a trait, right?
You can name a trait from a leadership perspective. that you think is a positive trait and you'll immediately see that if you go too far with it, it'll become bad. It'll become bad. So you have to be balanced. So even as I came up with the dichotomy of leadership, I had to be humble enough to say to myself, you know what? Being aggressive is really, really good most of the time, but if you're too aggressive, that's not good.
Yeah.
So like you said earlier, you're constantly questioning everything. And to me, what that is, that's humility. that's you being humble enough to say, you know what? I really don't understand this that well. And there's some things in my life that I don't get. Whereas opposed to you walking around saying, I already got this figured out. I already know what I'm doing. I already know where I'm going. I already know what God is specifically. I already know what's gonna happen to me when I die.
All those things.
But instead you're questioning everything, which in my mind is a positive thing.
Yeah, that's good to know. Is there anything that is what's missing in your life? You feel like something's missing?
I know I feel like I'm living a pretty good life right now. I mean, I'm totally blessed. I mean, I got a great family. I got great kids. I got a great company. I got working with great people. No, healthy. Healthy, you know, get to work out, train. I'm feeling good.
Living the dream, man.
Yeah, living the dream.
So you never feel like there's something missing for you right now? If there is, you're working towards it, you're working on the next book, you're building the business.
Yeah, well there's a difference between something missing and am I satisfied? Yeah, right? Because I'm not satisfied. I mean, I always want to go, like I never get done with the end of the day and go, cool, mission accomplished.
Like it's like you've got to be close. Yeah, yeah.
So you're not satisfied but you feel like nothing's missing.
Yeah, yeah, I'd say that's a fair statement. What brings you the most joy in your life and makes you smile the most?
Oh, I mean my kids. My kids are cool. They're funny. You know, my wife and kids.
Yeah.
My wife and kids are cool and funny and we have a good time and lots of inside jokes and all that.
Yeah.
You know, and I train jiu-jitsu and that's very fun. And surf, that's fun.
Yeah.
Play guitar, that's fun.
How old are your kids again? Age?
20, 18, 16 and 10.
And what's the biggest lesson you learned about being about yourself being a father to them?
Your kids are not going to be who you want them to be.
You can't train them to be.
They're going to be who they are. And you can give them some course corrections a little bit, but they're going to be who they are. And the more you try and force them into what you want them to be, the harder they're going to push back and rebel.
Wow.
Yep. Did you learn that the hard way or did you get.
Yep. So you tried to train them in.
A certain way or.
Yeah, somewhat.
And it's pretty obvious, like, from my perspective, I was having a similar conversation with a bunch of Executives, and. And they were. We were talking. We, you know, we went down the road because we're having dinner now, so we're done talking about.
Work.
But now everyone wants to ask me about, you know, parenting and everything else. And, and I said at the table, I'm like, hey, who here ended up doing exactly what their parents wanted them to do? And there's like one guy out of 10, right? Because most people, you know, your parents are wanting you to do this thing, and you do something else. I mean, I joined the Navy when I was 18 years old. Like, that's, that probably wasn't even on the checklist of top 20 things that my parents wanted me to do, not even in the same ballpark. park, right?
They didn't want you to go to war.
Yeah, they didn't want that. So here you go. Yeah, see ya. That's so the more you try and kind of pigeonhole your kids into being something that you want them to be, the worse off it's going to be. It's the same thing with leadership. It's the same thing with leadership. If I'm, if I'm trying to force my plan down my team's throat, the more resistance I'm going to get from it. Whereas if I plant the seed and I allow that plan to grow with them, the better it's going to be received. Like when people ask me, how do you get people to buy in? Well, you allow them to come up with a plan yourself.
What if in your mind you're like, you really know that plan is not that good.
It depends on how bad it is. How bad is it? Or what's at stake? If you're working for me and you're going to meet with a client and you have a bad pitch that you're going to give them and the client is some tiny client that I think is a low probability of us working with and the contract doesn't really matter. I'd be like, Hey, hey, give it a shot. Here's a couple. I might give you a couple adjustments and give you some coaching on it. And then you go and you do your thing and you come back and you're like, oh, no, we didn't land it. And I say, well, what do you think? Let's debrief. And now we talk about it. I said, you know, you said this and you said that. Here's some other ways to go about it. I might even actually have you do it to me. So then I could sit there and take some notes and say, Hey, here's some other things that might have worked. Now, if you were going to meet with a big client that really was going to add value to our company, I'm going to either- Yeah, I'm going to step in and be like, okay, let's think about that. What's their reaction going to be? And by the way, that's what I'm not going to say, no, don't do it that way. I'm going to say, Tell me that again. And let me give you some objections that you might hear from them. And all of a sudden, I'll let you come up with the solutions. Even though I'm sitting there going, yeah, what he needs to say is this. No, I'll let you come up with a solution. So then you're kind of going in there like you got this dialed and then you're going to feel like you won, which you did.
That's great.
Which is great.
It gives you more ownership, more respect in yourself, competence, belief. How important is feedback for leaders? Getting feedback from peers, coaches or employees, team members.
Feedback is how you get better. No feedback, no improvement. So, and if you're not humble, you're not looking for feedback and you're not listening to it. So if you think you know everything, you're not listening, you're definitely not asking for it. Even when it gets told to you, you don't listen to it. So feedback is built upon being humble.
What would you say is in your way to getting to the next level? What feedback do you think you need to hear or receive from your team or people in order to reach the next goals that you have?
I mean, the weird thing about me is even though you might look at me and think, oh, who's gonna tell this guy anything? The reality is, if anyone of my friends, my team, anyone that works for me up and down the chain of command, if they think I'm wrong, everyone will say, Hey, I don't know if that's a good plan. So, even when I was a task unit commander, so I'm in charge, and I'm the head seal for this 40 seals. I'm the main guy. Anyone on that chain of command, those guys would all come to me and say, Hey, I don't know if this is a good way to do it. And you know what I'd say? Why not? What do you think? What are you thinking? How do you think we should do it? My mind is open. If my plan is bad, please tell me. They would know that. So my friends, my family, they'll tell me when I'm doing something wrong all day long.
They're not intimidated or scared of you. No, that's good.
No.
So how does a leader cultivate that with his family, friends, team in order to welcome the feedback of the information.
Yeah, what you do is when somebody gives you feedback, you listen to it. This is like, you know, just the other day we have a leadership event that we do two or three times a year, but the thing that I was telling this group of people was, as a leader, you should be listening 98% of the time and talking 2% of the time. So every time you come to me and you say, Hey, Jaco, I don't like this plan. I don't say shut up and do it my way. I say, how would you want to do it? Tell me what you don't like about it and then tell me how you want to do it. So therefore, the next time you have an objection, you're like, you know the door is open, you know that I'm going to be open-minded and listen to you and that's how you build it. Every time you shut someone down from speaking their mind, you actually are creating a negative environment where you're not going to get the feedback and it's if there's no feedback, as we just said, you're not going to improve.
What are two things that any leader could do to improve their leadership skills right off the bat? Two things you can think of. And what are two things that wannabe leaders do that hold them back from being great leaders? So, what are the two things they could add to their leadership?
Yeah, two things that you add. Number one is listen, which we just talked about. So, that's fresh on my mind. you'd be surprised about how many leaders are thinking that because they're in a leadership position, they should be talking all the time. Wrong answer. Wrong answer. I'll sit through a meeting with a client or with one of my companies and I'll listen for 38 minutes. And at the end of those 38 minutes, I'll have already thought through every discussion that's been had. You know, you want to argue with him and he's arguing with her. And guess what? I get to sit there and assess those arguments and see which one is the most important. You're expending all your ammunition. She's expending all her ammunition. He's given up everything he's got. I'm learning all their thought patterns. I'm learning the pros and cons of each one of their arguments. And I do that for 38 minutes. And in the 39th minute, I say, Hey, here's what I think we should do. And guess what? Because I've done an accurate assessment and listened, I'm actually going to be able to make the best decision. It wasn't because I was smarter. It wasn't because I had better tactical understanding, it's because I actually shut my mouth, listened to everyone spill their guts, learned everything that they knew and did a good detached assessment of what the right thing to do was. So listen and the other one is the word that I just used which is detach, which is not getting emotional, not getting into the weeds about stuff that doesn't matter. If you can take a step back and look around, you're going to see infinitely more than you can when you're in the weeds staring the firefight in the face, looking down the sights of your weapon shooting. If you're doing that, you can't see anything else. Just think about that metaphor right there. If I'm looking down the sights of my weapon and I'm shooting, my world is this big. The minute that I stop shooting, Point my weapon at high port, take a step back and actually look around. I can see infinitely more. So apply that to a meeting. This is the meeting that we just talked about. A 38 minute meeting. All this chaos is happening. Sure, I'm the boss. I could jump in there and start arguing and giving my opinion. But what am I really doing then? What I'm really doing then is in the weeds and I'm not able to assess what is actually happening. So that so there you apply it there to your personal life. if you and I are arguing, you're my friend and you did something and now we're starting to escalate an argument and I'm starting to get emotional, am I able to listen to you anymore? Am I able to logically figure out what's going on? If I'm talking to my wife and she did something that made me mad and now I'm starting to raise my voice, is that whole situation going in the right direction?
No.
No, it's not. It's not. So what I need to do is take a step back, detach, calm down, listen to what she's saying and then try and assemble a logical thing to say back without saying you need to calm down or you're too emotional. No, no, no, no, no. Because if you come to me and you're mad about something, you come to me whether it's my wife or whether you're a business partner, you come to me and you say the dang The supply department didn't give me the stuff I needed. If I say, hey, calm down, right? If that's my reaction, then you realize that I'm against you, right? I don't get it. And so now it's me and the supply department against you.
No one understands.
No one understands. So I do a little technique.
What is that?
Yeah, I call it reflect and diminish. So I'm gonna reflect your emotions back to you, but I'm gonna diminish them a little bit so that we're not escalating the situation.
How would you do this with your wife?
So if you, well if you come to me and you go, the supply department's been late for two weeks on this stuff. I don't say, calm down. I say, oh, you gotta be kidding me. Two weeks? And you go, yeah, can you believe it? Ah, that's horrible. We gotta put a solution. We gotta get that figured out. In the meantime, what do we need to do? right now to get the problem solved. So we already, now we're on the.
Same team so we can work together to find the solution. We bonded on the pain. Yes.
You felt the pain. Yes. We're on the same team. Okay, my wife, what's gonna make my wife mad? The ice machine's not working. Right, the ice machine's not working. It's your fault. Whether it's my fault, but we don't know. The ice machine's not working. By the way, this is a real story. This is happening today. The ice machine's not working. She didn't get mad about it, The ice machine's not working. If I go, hey, chill out. You have a refrigerator and a house and you know, you can just calm down, right?
How's that gonna go?
It's not gonna go good. Now she's gonna get mad, now it's me against her. So instead, the ice machine's not working. Ah, man, that thing is junk. Have you called the repair guy?
You know what I mean?
And then all of a sudden we're on the same team and she's like, well, no, I haven't, but I'm about to. Okay, cool. As opposed to the ice machine's not working. Well, okay, you want me to have ice shipped in from Alaska there, princess?
Right?
That's not gonna go over well.
So what would you call it? Reflect and diminish.
Reflect and diminish.
What if someone's coming after you and attacking you? Not like the supply chain or the ice machine, but it's like, you didn't do this.
Oh yeah, this is your fault. I want you to guess what I'm gonna do.
What's that?
What do you guess I'm gonna do? If you come and attack me and tell me something's my fault, what do you think I'm gonna do?
You personally?
Yes.
You would listen, reflect and diminish.
I would actually-- Detach. Detach, yes.
How do you detach your emotions from someone coming after you emotionally? Even if it was or wasn't your fault.
Well, there's a couple things that you've asked me now in the last couple minutes. It's all good, 'cause it's all exciting. 'Cause I can see like your mind is spinning here. You're absorbing and you're like, oh, this makes sense. If you're attacking my ego immediately, as soon as I feel frustrated, angry, defensive, all three of those things are red flags to me that that's my ego.
Okay.
I immediately know, I go, when I feel my bristling, yeah, when I feel that, I know it's a hard, I guarantee it's not 99% is just my ego that I'm mad. So what are you doing that moment? I immediately go, oh, that's your ego, you idiot. Listen to what he's got to say. Let's win. Let's win. So how do I win?
Do I win by attacking you?
No.
No, I don't win by attacking you. If you're the only winner, you both lose.
Yes.
So when you attack me... You both need to win. And you say, whatever your attack is, you say, this is your fault. I go, you, know what? Absolutely, this is my fault. Here's the mistake that I made, and I know it affected you. in a negative way, here's the things that I'm working on right now to remedy it. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna yell at me more? Are you gonna tell me it's my fault again?
Like I just- A crazy person might say a couple more times.
And a crazy person, I'll be like, yeah, I know. You know, I get this, this is another question I get when it's sort of like similar to what you said earlier, when you said, yeah, but what if it's not really your fault?
Right?
The other one I get a lot is if you say, Hey, listen, Louis, this is my fault that this happened. You go, you,'re right, it is your fault. And then people say, what do I do then?
What do I do then?
If the person's blaming me, how do I take ownership then? And I'm like, that's the whole point. That's the whole point. The whole point of taking ownership is when you look at me and you point your finger and you say, this is all your fault. I say, Yes, I know. That's what I just said. This is absolutely my fault. I'm the one that's in charge and these are the things that I'm going to do to fix it. that's where we're going to start. So when someone blames you, yes, take ownership. Now, if you have in the back.
Of your mind like you did earlier.
Like, hey, maybe this isn't really my fault. Like, if you have that in the back of your mind, you're actually wrong. You're actually wrong.
You're in charge.
And that applies to your life as well. That applies to your life as well. How you, you know, you got to take ownership of what's going on in your life. When you're not where you want to be and you say it's been It's because the boss doesn't like you or it's because the girl treated you this way or the guy did this. Like all those things, you gotta take ownership of them. And if you're blaming all these other external things, you're not gonna make any changes. And that's gonna be a problem.
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There's no growth outside of quiet. The world is too noisy. Your mind needs quiet for you to find who you are. People ask, what's my purpose? Why am I here? You're not gonna find it nowadays unless you lock yourself in a quiet room in your mind and find it. It's too noisy. For me, I could be in a busy street in New York City, horns honking, and I'm walking around with like nothing. It's me and myself in a quiet spot. And when you are constantly reflecting on who you are, where you've been, the journey you've gone through, the journey you can continue going through, the feeling is always there. You don't allow the world to pull you so fast that you forget. You don't allow yourself to pull you so fast that you forget. It's not about staying in that moment. It's about you want to get to the point where that feeling follows you like breathing. It becomes a part of your life, part of your DNA. But it's made, like these calluses on my hands right now, they're made. They are now on my brain. This is now a part of me. It's a daily process, a part of me. And how I go back to a $7 a month place all the time is now I go out and I dig Fire Line. I'm a wildland firefighter. I don't need to do it. I'm a 43 year old man. I work with 27 year old kids. I'm a rookie. Every day I'm a rookie, it feels like.
Why do you do it?
That's why I do it, man. There's a story I'm gonna tell you about why I do it. So I make, I have a good living now for me, where I'm at in my life. 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 dad going up 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, three 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 pretty much lay down, you go to sleep, and you get up, you dig some more. Really?
This happens for two weeks long. What are you digging?
It's like a hole. So, 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 is moving, it can't burn dirt.
Really? So you're moving fuels.
Got it.
So not only are you digging, you're cutting down trees. It's hard work. But the moral 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 have a good life. I don't need to do it. Everybody asks me why I do it. This is why. This 21 year old kid was out there and he wanted a pair of running shoes. So all he wanted was a pair of running shoes. 60, 70, 100 bucks to whatever, you know, easy for us.
Yeah.
He looked up at the mountain that we had been on for days digging this fire line and he said, that'll take me five or six hours of work to buy those shoes. So I'm not gonna buy them. It's the perspective of life. That perspective of life right there. 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 about that mountain and thought, he looked at his hands, he looked at the amount of hours of pulling that Pulaski, that tool, and raking that ground, and then cutting those trees and moving them. And that hours of work, he looked at his feet and said, these old shoes would do. It's that perspective in life that we lose. And that's that story that 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.
Yeah. So true. We were in Guatemala, was it this year or last year? Last year. We were in Guatemala last year. We support a charity called Pencil of Promise that builds schools schools for kids who live in poverty and all around the world. And every year I take a trip to just see where our efforts are being, you know, felt and being made. And these are the poorest places in Guatemala, Laos, and Ghana. Places they have nothing. There's no schools, they're little villages, they live on dirt huts, everything, right? And we go and we build these schools. We actually The villages build them themselves. We just fund the experience and they empower them to do it so that they take ownership of it. But I'll be there for a few days and watch these kids so happy with just like a pencil.
Right.
Just so happy to just like have their family around and they'll go and they'll show us their huts and like they're just so happy to have community and then I'll fly back and go through Beverly Hills right over here and I'll see like these mansions, you know, I live right next to it. And I'm just like, it gives me so much perspective of like, you don't need to have all these things to find peace and joy and connection and intimacy and all these other things that we want. You don't need these big mansions and to live in this nice place. You know, I like living here, but it's not like, it's perspective for me is what keeps me motivated as well.
That's right.
To to keep doing the right things, to keep showing up, keep working hard. And I think it's right. Most of us miss that perspective in life.
We get so far away from reality.
So far.
And the reality is, man, when I was seven years old, eight years old, all I wanted was a 99 cent quarter pounder from Hardee's.
I know, right?
And that made me happy as hell.
Some curly fries, man.
That's it, man.
That's it.
Yeah.
The thing is, a lot of us have been Conditioned or some of us grew up with wealth or grew up with comfort.
Right.
So we're conditioned that way and we're grown up expecting now that things should come a lot easier.
Right.
That's a damn shame.
We get frustrated when we don't get it right.
Quickly.
Quickly.
Yes.
Yeah.
And I'm always talking about delayed gratification. Like the longer I can wait to receive gratification, the more fulfilled I am.
I'm a person. So when I got sick like I did, I actually had to quit this race called Badwater.
Yeah.
135 miles, yeah.
Through Death Valley. It was 2014 when I got real, real bad. I pulled out of the race at mile 50. I went to the emergency room and the docs were like, you know, we can't find this, we can't find that, we know what's wrong with you. When I got in that bed, so this is the crazy thing about gratification, long term. I'm able to watch grass grow by finding out this. I sat there, couldn't run a quarter mile, couldn't get a bed. The only thought I had in my mind, I pulled out of that race, I told myself, I'm gonna go back to Badwater one day and run it. I'm gonna win the race. Haven't been back since. Haven't been back since 2019. Am I saying I'm gonna win it? I'm just now in the shape to go back.
Wow.
I haven't won 100 mile race since 2014.
Wow.
Because I've been that sick. I'm just now. Imagine the gratification I'm going to get by getting to the start line of that race. And what if I can win it?
Be pretty sweet.
Pretty sweet.
Four or five years. Yeah.
Imagine that. Of having that kind of deal, of having that kind of self-discipline to every day wake up and having these setbacks where I can run a mile.
Wow.
But I'm thinking about running 135. I can't run one mile, but I'm thinking about running 135. And with that process, guess what happens? Sooner or later, you can run 10 miles. It may take a year, but it gives you more and more hope that it's possible. And I'm at the point now where guess what? It's right around the corner.
Wow.
Most people in that time frame, in that, in that. In that mindset, I can't run anymore, it's over. No, it's just gonna take a little bit longer. You have to turn the negative into a positive. At the end of it all, if you can sit back and wait, if you can wait six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 years, when you get to that point, when you finish, that's the feeling for 12 years. Let's say it takes 12 years to get there. That's what keeps you going, is you gotta feel, I'm doing it for one second.
Years of pain.
For one second. One second. Think about it. You cross the finish line, it's over. One second.
Most people do that, and the one second isn't what they thought it would be. and then they're pissed and upset and they keep going on to the next because they never reflect back on what they did.
It's not the one second, it's the 12 years.
Yeah.
It's the 12 years that I want. Not the race. Mm-. It's the 12 years why you did it.
It's not the winning.
It's not the winning.
It's not what place you got.
No.
But most of us focus on.
That's right.
Oh, I gotta win this.
Right.
If I don't, I'm gonna be. that I would achieve all my athletic goals for years and then 10 minutes later be the angriest person in the world. So angry and frustrated, nasty with people. And I would delay my gratification for years to achieve what I wanted.
That's right.
And I never understood that either.
Being a perfectionist is the worst thing that can happen to a person. You never live. Like, I lost that 106 pounds in like two and a half months, whatever it took me. That was the biggest trophy of my entire life. I didn't care if I graduated Navy SEAL training. I didn't care. What I just accomplished in that timeframe, it's massive. I don't know, there was no trainer, there was no, like, it was funny about this, we talked about mental toughness nowadays, it's like the biggest crave. When I grew up, it was just suck it up. It was just make it happen. You had to figure out. It was called Figure It Out, man. And all these nuggets that I gained along the way, that's what it was about. It wasn't about the Trident. It wasn't about all those dead on medals. It wasn't about any of that. And that's why I hate even talking about being a seal, you know? I mentioned stories, people, why you talk about it didn't define me. The journey getting there was harder than going through it.
Yeah.
You know? That's the whole thing about life, man. It's that journey that makes you who you are. Yeah.
And as opposed to focusing on did I win or not, what did I gain from the last 12 years? And so when you finish now, what do you think about? How long do you reflect back on the effort it took to accomplish that race or...
A long time. Weeks, years. You'll reflect back now. There's times now where I would reflect back on my first 100 mile race. Still today. Still today. And it'll give me the same exact feeling. Because what I did in that first race when I was under trained, I did it on four days notice. I hadn't run more than, I think, 20 miles the whole year. And I did it to raise money for this foundation, you know, to try to get in the bad water. What I had to pull out of myself on that last, that's where that book, Live to Steal, kind of originated. Jesse Isler saw me at this race.
He was racing too.
Yeah, but he did it as a team.
Right, you did it alone.
I did it alone. And that's what I talk with people about, man. I spent so much time, people always like, why do you run so much? You know, you try to get in shape. No, the things I do in life, most of life, you're alone. you may have a whole support crew around you, but up here, you're alone. Most of the stuff I do, I'm training for that one, those moments. Those moments when I was at mile 70 and I had 30 more miles to go and I had, I crapped up my back and peeing blood down my leg. I had 30 miles to go. There's only so much someone can do for you, right? When you start to dive back in the cellar of your mind, and you're pulling out all these tactics, all these mental tactics to get through this 30 miles when you're in the worst shape of your life and no one's coming to save you and you get through that. I want to go back there. When I got done with that race, I laid in the tub and my ex-wife helped me get up the stairs and I'm laying in this tub and Coca-Cola is coming out of me. She just looks like dirt. And she's a nurse and she's freaking out. And she puts the shower on me and I'm looking at her and all I want to do is call the race director up, a bad word, saying, I qualify for the race. And she's thinking, we gotta go to the hospital so she's calling my mom and my mom has a doctor friend of hers who's over and they're freaking out. And I said, everybody, just shut up.
Wow.
Shut up. I'm in the worst pain in my entire life. and no one would ever understand this. No one. When you've gone that deep inside yourself and all those feelings of pain that I had, I was in the worst pain of my life, ever. And some people think, man, you're just crazy. No, when you've done that and you've figured out so much on your own and all that pain and discomfort I had in that tub laying there, passing out, everything was confirmation of what I just figured out. I just figured out the code. I figured out a code. A code that many people aren't looking for. And I wanted to be known. I wanted that feeling. This was confirmation. This was like a scientist's notes. The notes were here. The notes were all this feeling. It was a confirmation and no one at that time could understand what I just done. I cracked the code to human potential in myself. And I was still like, oh my God, this is unbelievable what I just did. So it's that quiet place. It's that place by yourself. It's those hours and years and decades by yourself in the grip of life. When life has you by the throat and choking you out and you're sitting there calm because you're trying to figure it out. You're not panicking, you're not quitting, you're not throwing in the towel. You're saying there's a way around this. And when you figure it out, when life has you gripped in a vice and you can figure that out, that's when you overcome. That's when you overcome. And that's why that one moment for me in that tub, I didn't want anyone to take away from it. Wow.
This is crazy man, I love this. Do you have any fears today?
I do have a lot of fears today. But it's hard for me to call them fears anymore.
Yeah.
I don't use that word anymore. They're almost like, It's another challenge. Yeah. Because anything that makes me feel that fear feeling is going to get overcome.
You go do it.
It's going to get conquered. That is, that's almost like fear is my ultimate guide.
Where you're supposed to be going.
Where I'm supposed to be going. It's my ultimate guide.
So, what's the big challenge then for you then?
The biggest challenge for me is always going, I want to be comfortable.
You want to be comfortable. You want to sleep in a nice bed and relax. I'm a normal human being.
You want to chill out. And the time is gonna come. It's time for everybody to get civilized.
The worst thing in life that happens.
To a man is they get civilized. Or a woman, anybody. 'Cause you lose the hunger for life. You think you've arrived. And once you have an I've arrived mentality, that's my biggest fear. is I get to point right. I'm at that point where life has come to me and I had that feeling of I've arrived. I now know my life for what I know it to be is over. Even though that's where comfort is and everything else, I found the most life in the most uncomfortable places in the world. I was the most David.
The.
The Gargons that I invented. 'Cause David Goggins was weak. I never want to get rid of Goggins. The guy I created, that weak person that used to be, the guy I created that can handle anything. You don't want to let go of that guy because you realize that that guy was made. You weren't born him. And that is, when you get comfortable, Goggins starts to die. he starts to die. That one creature from the Black Lagoon that can live in the sewer, that can eat rats all day, that doesn't need water, that doesn't need sunlight, that doesn't need nothing. He can just live because he knows he can. That's a powerful human being that you never want to, it's in everybody. That's the scary thing about, that's what makes me so upset, man. Is that everybody wants to put this daggone label on me They forget the first three chapters of my book They forget how this started a lot of times it takes someone's wife dying or something like that for them to change.
Yeah, near death.
Yeah something no, no, no, none of that I wanted to figure out a Is there more to this horrible feeling of feeling like a loser? Can I change this? And once you figure out I have the ability not through your mom or your dad or through a special school, through you. You have the ability to change this. That's what makes it so mad. Once people put this title on me, you now give yourself a get out of jail free card and say, oh, he's just crazy, he's special, he's unique, he's this and that. You just saved yourself from not having.
To do the work.
From not having to do the work.
Yeah.
And that's why I want people to hear my story. I'm trying to take away all that bull crap that you want to put on me. I'm trying to make you suffer up here to know what my God, man. He really had a hard way to go.
Wow.
There was nothing special about him. He wasn't talented. He wasn't gifted. He wasn't nothing. He wasn't nothing and he made it. I want everybody to feel uncomfortable around me. That's it. Because I want you to go home and think about yourself.
Yeah.
Think about yourself, man, because you're leaving so much on the table for the possibilities of what you can be.
You say most people are at 40% potential. What percent are you at?
I like to say that I live in the 90% tile. Sometimes 99, 100% is dead.
99 sometimes.
99 sometimes. The reason why I know 99 is because the first five hours of my day, I am very uncomfortable.
What do you do?
First of all, every morning I get up and people think I love to run. I don't.
That's why you do it.
That's why I do it. And people don't understand the mentality. Oh, you have to love it. Man, no, running has changed my life because every morning I know I'm gonna do it. If you know it, every morning you do something that you don't like. Every morning I would do it for, and guess what? If I just ran for an hour a day, a day is 24 hours, right? What percent is that? What's one hour over 20? Was that 4%? Yeah. A small percent. But anyway, that's why I know I'm at a high level 'Cause I'm at a dis-- not wanting to be this, you know, uncomfortable. I put myself in the dungeon every day off jump. Out of bed, it starts.
Shoes on.
Out of bed. Why most people lose the battle in the morning, like, once you leave your beautiful house, the war starts. Nowadays it starts before you leave home. The phone rings, social media's up, the world's attacking you. If you don't control what you can to build that armor, so in the morning time, what I'm doing is I'm building my armor. It gets broken every night. I get up in the morning time, I start to build the armor. Let's run, okay? Gotta do our pushes, our sets, our pull-ups, I go to the gym, gotta do our stretch.
Every morning I'm running.
You do one hour in the morning of training? Oh, no. In the morning time, I do at.
Least an hour and a half, and.
Then I go to the gym.
Of running? Hour and a half of running? Hour and a half of running.
Yes.
That I'm in the gym and that night time, every night for the last five to six years, about five and a half years, I've only missed two days of stretching for two to three hours.
Two to three hours a night stretching.
I've only missed two days in five or about five and a half years. Wow.
Stretching.
Stretching.
And the way we do it in.
The, in spec Ops is we, we.
Control what we can control. So some, some people have referred to.
It kind of control your three-foot world. But it doesn't have to extend. It's not a three-foot thing.
It's what in this moment can I control? And then take control of that. Because then you are grabbing onto certainty.
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