How To Go From Fat, Lazy, & Unfocused To MASTERING SELF-DISCIPLINE | David Goggins & Lewis Howes

I grew up dyslexic, so I can relate to that of just, like constantly feeling stupid and insecure and, you know, I had a tutor my entire life until I finished college. I had a tutor, second grade reading level when I was in eighth grade. It was just like a constant struggle emotionally. And I took that outlet into sports and said, I'm going to just train myself to be the best I can be in a place where I can learn something differently and pick up a different skill. But with your. With your learning disability, with your dad beating you, screaming at you, emotionally challenging your mind with the racism you dealt with, with the different struggles you felt with bullies, what was the hardest obstacle to overcome? From up until about 15, 16, the.

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

What were you saying to yourself?

I'm dumb. I'm nobody. My dad, I mean, my dad was great in mental warfare. A drunk, insecure man will make everybody around him feel like hell yeah. Because he wants to give you no power. And that's why he was so mean to my mom and myself and my brother, because he didn't want anybody to get above him. He wanted to keep you down low. So when you're growing up with all of this stuff, all this hate, and it wasn't the beatings. I could take the beatings all day. It was a mental torture. So when at a young age, your. 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 want to put me in a special school. Yeah. You know, with kids who can't learn. Right. Then it was confirmed what. You know, what my dad was saying. So that confirmed it. Then I started cheating. So I started realizing, you know what? I'm taking the easy way out again. And it started snowballing from there. Now the kids are calling me, but it wasn't all the kids. So what happens is you start to get this picture that everybody hates you because your reality becomes so. So Big that you don't. I mean, you can't see the clear picture.

It might have been three or four.

That's it.

Doing it over and over.

Right. But it was the whole town.

Yeah.

Everybody hated me. So the world hates me. That's right.

Yeah.

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

Wow. So those are the conversations.

Those are the conversations.

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

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

Really?

Because now I'm 16. 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 on my car was spray painted, we're gonna kill you.

Oh, my gosh.

And about 10 minutes from Braziliana is a small town called Center Point Indian. And Center Point, Indiana, is. Was at that time, a huge hub of the KKK. Wow. In 1995, the Klan marched in the 4th of July parade. There's a picture in the book in 1995. 10 minutes from my house of crosses being burned.

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 you and your dad beat you, and your mom's fiance gets murdered. And tragedy after tragedy, 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 kid on the car, and I went in to get the principal. There's several incidents like this that happened. I went to get the principal, and the principal, he didn't have anything. He couldn't give me any advice. And I didn't want to tell my mom about it because my mom was already bothered by my dad beating her down. And now her fiance got murdered. So I didn't want to bother.

The last thing on her mind, she's like, I've dealt with this my whole life, right?

I didn't want to bother with anything, man. So I kept everything away from her. So I'm in the car wash 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, your son is going to fail. He's not going to 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 know you're gonna fail. You're gonna fail school. Wow. And I was like, my God, man. Like, you know, she. 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, 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. 6.

17.

17. I wanted to go into the delayed entry program, and I went to take the ASVAB test, and I cheated.

So that's what you knew?

That's what I did. You're good. So I got my friend because I walked into recruiter's office, and recruiter says, hey, you gotta take this ASVAB test. Second I heard test. I was like, man, oh, hang on a second.

I can't test to save my life, man.

I'm gonna go. Can I come back tomorrow? Yeah.

Yeah.

So I come back and the. The. 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, 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 twice or twice?

I actually felt it. I felt it twice. In the third time, I said, mom, I need help.

Wow.

And she said, we don't have much money, but we can afford a tutorial for one hour a week for six months because this is my last time taking the test. And so I had to learn so at a third grade reading level, I'm a junior in high school.

Yeah.

So I had six months to learn all this stuff and 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 couldn't retain anything. And it was so much to learn. It 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.

Simple stuff.

Simple stuff. I hear you, man. So I started memorizing. Yeah.

That's my life.

So I had to memorize.

Yeah.

So. So I didn't really learn it. I could just recall it from writing it down so many times that on page 71, I remember seeing that. 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. She doesn't know how much she taught me because she wasn't much into teaching. Mom old. 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.

Yeah.

And I was able to sit back and watch her mistakes. I was able to see how she struggled through life and how I don't want to struggle through life. And I was able to see she never picked me up. The biggest thing she did for me, and this is honest to God truth, and she doesn't even know she did it. 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, it's gonna be okay. She didn't have time for that. And sometimes she gets upset when I talk about my past because it pains 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 because she forced me. For every 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 because 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 going to be okay. Matter of fact, she told me the exact opposite. Life sucks. That's what she knew. It 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, put in the extra reps. They want the easiest path to get to the top.

Right, 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. Pain and finding, Looking for the pain.

Right.

I think there's like a, there's a, there's a safe pain and then there's a probably an unsafe pain of just like jumping off a building and, you know, whatever and trying to land up 20 floors or something. It's probably not the safe way to do things, 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 a good structured environment. You've been doing that for the last couple years now. It's like you work out every day. You haven't missed a day.

I do it for the last 20, 20 years of my life.

20 years.

No, 20 some years of my life.

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 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. At a zone one heart rate, very low heart rate. And I replace the carbohydrates in my body while I roll. Because the best way to recover for me is to do something at a very low heart rate. Because therefore, your blood's flowing through your body.

Yeah.

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 not flowing at a low heart rate. So it's not burning it, it's refueling it.

Yeah.

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, we're talking about recovery. Everybody. Everybody that hears me speak, they want to go straight to recovery. Work out first. Huh? Work out first. Before you talk to me about recovery, how to recover. Yeah. Work out first. We are always looking for, like, whenever I talk to people, people take my words and they. And they. And they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable. This guy, you know, they. They. 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, I made this person. I made this person by diving into the insecurities that life gave me. Because now they're yours. They're yours to own. If you're not smart, call yourself dumb. It's okay, because you are. But take that knowledge. You put yourself down. If you're fat, call yourself fat. I used to be £300. We. We want to talk. So soft off 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 likely 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.

Yeah.

Real authentic confidence from hard work. Everything else goes away. You no longer look to other people.

For yourself, for validation.

You now know. I walk in a 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, 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. 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 are going to be 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 get by when I realized that I can learn through hard work and I can beat the valedictorian in school, but I got poured 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, that validator is lady 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 Gaga's got really invented.

Yeah.

Was at a kitchen table with 20 spiral notebooks that were. Were empty and then three months later down. Yeah, 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 going to take me 10 hours.

Wow.

And that. That's where it. And you realize through hard work, you can do, 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 got to start diving into those things that you are afraid of. You don't gain confidence by going to the spot, spot that makes you feel good. It's going to be a false reality. And the second life gives you that challenge. All you want to do is go back to 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 ways 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 going to watch this. You know what gives me confidence is knowing I no longer care if I sit 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 face them and face 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 where my confidence is getting built. That's where it's getting built. But people want to. They want an easier answer. Yeah, there has to be an easier way. There's not. I'm sorry. I searched for it my entire life. I did. 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 the backpack with all my stuff in it and 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 a hundred years old and they die miserable having everything because they never examined. I call it my live autopsy biopsy. You never examine this Happiness, peace, enlightenment. It's all up here, man. It's all up here. If I start talking like this. People are, man, you know? I don't know. It's the truth, man.

Yeah, it is true.

It's all up here. You just gotta be willing to go and face it. That's the hard part. If you want more greatness in your.

Life, then you gotta check out this video, right?

So I realized if that 2 minutes and 13 seconds changed my life. So I was. I saw something that I needed to be in the world I was living in. Maybe my story will give someone the 2 minutes and 13 seconds they need to change their life. Millions of people live in a very comfortable place. That's fine. Don't listen to me. A lot of people are looking for that 2 minutes and 13 seconds, and I might be that person.