These 5 SECRETS Destroy Laziness IN SECONDS! | Lewis Howes & Jordan Peterson

It got me through the hardest training, starting out broken. Where most people quit, I just started.

If we are consistently moving towards our edge and then getting there, we are growing, you know, because guess what we're doing at that point.

It shouldn't be so much that you're crippled by it and unable to take action. You shouldn't be beating yourself into the ground because you're not everything you could be because no one is and if you beat yourself into the ground then you can't get up and improve.

It's time to stop being lazy and start learning the discipline necessary to achieving the life you've always wanted. That's why in this video I've brought together some of the top Navy SEALs and other massively successful people to help you never be lazy again. Make sure to subscribe to this channel, drop a like and leave a comment with your biggest takeaway below. What do you think of the skills that people should start to develop in their 20s in general to make them better human beings, more potentially open to success financially, relationship, health-wise, what are two or three things that everyone should focus on in their 20s?

Well, it certainly doesn't hurt to be in physical, good physical condition so we can walk through it. Stop drinking too much. How do you know if you're drinking too much? You regret what you do when you're drinking. It's interfering with other important goals. It's causing you financial distress. It's getting you in trouble with your friends or your family. It's getting you in trouble with the police. Okay? So stop abusing substances if you can, right? If you see that they're, hurting you. An alcohol is particularly pernicious in that regard.

So.

Physical health, are you in decent shape? Are you strong and coordinated? And if you're not, well, you'd be better if you were. You'd feel better, you'd be more effective, you'd live longer, you'd be less sick. and you really see that mount up. Like if someone's been in shape once in their life, they age way better. And it's also a really good way of maintaining your cognitive ability. Like, you know, you hear about those exercises that you can do online to make you smarter and keep your cognitive ability intact. Those don't work. There's no evidence that they work. People keep saying that they make you smarter, they maintain your cognitive function. Psychologists have studied that for 50 years. hoping that one of those things will work, trying all sorts of creative tacks, they don't work. Exercise works. Cardiovascular and weightlifting, you start to decline in your fluid intelligence at about the age of 25. And it's a linear trend downhill and it can accelerate as you get older. It's just like this, quite ugly. If you exercise, you stave that off. So that's really useful. Maintain your relationships and foster them. So when I look at successful people, they're really good at something. They're reliable, right? You can count on their word. They're generous and they have a wide, wide connection network, which becomes more and more valuable as you get older. So it's one advantage that older people really have over younger people. They have a connection network and a connection network is Huge.

Well.

You could be connected to a thousand well connected people. Okay, that means you are connected to the entire world.

Right?

It's unbelievably valuable. And that's one of the things that's so absolutely remarkable about the situation that I'm in right now. As far as one of the great benefits is I can contact pretty much anybody and they'll talk to me. It's like, really? That's so cool. I'm interested in infrastructure for reasons I won't get into, but I'm interested in infrastructure development. I think it's a good method of wealth transfer. It's a good solution to the problem of inequality and employment. I reached out to a leading expert on infrastructure last week to see if he'd talk to me. I thought, I don't know anything about infrastructure except that it's worn to a frazzle and we should do something about it. You know, he agreed to talk. Having a connection network is of an inestimable value.

It's huge.

Reliability, generosity, you can work on both of those. Philosophical sophistication, it's very useful because it orients you properly.

You.

Have a sophisticated sense of the world, you find, for example, that doing things for other people is actually more rewarding than virtually anything else you can do. You know, and you hear, you should be of service to other people. Well, if you actually watch yourself.

You.

Pay attention to yourself and you do something that helps someone else and it genuinely helps them, I defy you to find another experience that is that satisfying. It's actually quite stunning how satisfying that is. And so that's a very useful thing to realize.

And why is helping another person the most satisfying thing for probably most people when they're, if they're, you know, out of their ego of like, I want to buy more things to make me happy in this moment, why is that? Such a satisfying thing for human beings.

There's no better strategy for, there's no better life strategy. I mean, imagine, I could give you a quick sort of technical example. So imagine I take two people and I say, okay, I'm gonna give you $100 and you have to give some of it to the person right beside you. And they can either agree or disagree with the split, but if they disagree, you don't get anything. Okay, so a classical economist would say that the person should take the 100, offer the person next to them a dollar, and the person should accept it because why not? They get a dollar instead of nothing. And that's the solution. But what happens is that if you don't offer that other person something close to 50-50, They're likely to tell you to go to hell. Yes, very, very, very, very, you get nothing. You get nothing too. You think, well, why would people do that? Because they just reject $50 and who cares? And the answer is, well, we don't just play one game with other people. We play a repeating game. And so imagine we did this. So imagine it's a crowd and they're all watching you and I offer you $100 and you have to share it with the person next to you and you say, Would you like to take $70? And the person says, well, I'm not sure that's fair to you, but if it's okay, yes. But then everyone else sees that and now they all have an opportunity to pick who they're going to play with next. Well, you're not going to get picked last, are you? Remember what you told me? You didn't want to get picked last, right?

I did not.

Okay, so what you did was you turned yourself into an athlete.

A machine.

Okay. Okay, great. So, but imagine we expand that game.

Yes.

And we say, you want to be the person that everyone wants to play with.

Yep.

Well, then all you have in your whole life is invitations to play. Well, how, and how are you going to be that person? Be productive, straightforward, generous, make everyone else.

Better around you, and they're going to want to play with you.

Absolutely.

So there you go, and then you get to play.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, how is that not the best possible deal? It's clearly, see, so, so the re, if, if the ethical argument is put properly, it is by far the most compelling argument. It's like if you want to have everything you could possibly want and more, then be a good person. The better a person you are, the more likely that is to happen. That doesn't mean you, that you're completely protected against getting cut off at the knees. But there's no better strategy.

That's it.

And you can even think about it selfishly. And I talk about this to some degree beyond order. Let's say that you want to be selfish. You think that's the best possible strategy. Why should I care about others? Okay, let's say you should only act in your own best interest. Well, then it's like, well, what's your best interest? Well, what does interest mean? And what does you mean? What's in your best interest? Your best interest, three mysteries. What's your, what's best, what's interest? Okay, well, there's you. But you aren't just you right now. You're you and you tomorrow and you next week and you next month and you in five years and you in 10 years and you when you're a pensioner, you're a community of selves stretched across time. And so if you were enlightened and selfish, you would act in a manner that would benefit that entire community across time. And I don't think that's any different than acting on the best possible part for other people. I think they're the same problem. So I think as soon as human beings discovered the future, we were no longer singular individuals. We're instantly each a community. And then the community ethic prevails. And the community ethic is, I want to win in a way that makes you win. That's the best possible victory.

If I win and no one else wins, then what's the point?

Well, you think it's a zero-sum game. It's either you or me. Or maybe I want the comparative status. But I would say even if you want the comparative status, let's say you just you're motivated by that. What would confer upon you even hypothetically more status than to be the most popular person while being chosen for games? I mean, you think about the, just think for a second about it, because it struck me that biographical piece. Alfred Adler, who is the psychologist that I talked to you about earlier, he said one of his claims was that many people have a, like a, a stark memory that sets the course for their life.

That's true. Right. Moments.

Yeah. And you have exactly that. You. So Adlerian. psychology would be of great interest to you, I suspect. But partly, you see, what happened was you had a true revelation. You thought, if I'm being picked last, something is wrong. And that's absolutely right. It's unbelievably right. And you played it out first in the athletic domain, but you have to start somewhere. So that's a good place to start. Jocko was telling me when we talked this week, He's this tough character, man. You know, and he could have, and I'm not telling tales out of school here, he could have been a criminal, no problem. And he knows that perfectly well.

And.

I'm not saying that as a slur on his character, partly because I believe the Nietzschean dictum that a lot of morality is just cowardice. Whatever he might be, he's not a coward. And so, and just because you obey the laws doesn't mean you're moral. Just might mean you're afraid. In any case. So the question is, well, what socialized this brute? Well, he was taught in the Navy SEALs. Take care of your team. That's your fundamental purpose. And he noted, and we had a long discussion about this, the successful guys, man, you know they've got your back.

Wow. Right.

You know that above all. Yeah. And if you aspire to a leadership position among those brutes, let's say, and you aren't someone they know to have your back, they're not following.

You'Re not going to make it.

Yeah.

You're not going to make it.

What is the, what is the keys to building confidence when you feel insecure, afraid or, or scared of being embarrassed, whether it be dating someone or career or anything? What's the keys to building confidence so that you're attracting what you want?

Look, you, I read some of your biographical history before we talked today, and you tell a story about being picked last, and then you compensated for that.

Yes.

Now, there's Alfred Adler, by the way, the psychoanalyst, the associate of Freud, built his whole theory around compensation of that sort. Inferiority complex plus compensation. But it's adaptive, right? Like you got picked last, it embarrassed the hell out of you. So what did you do? You decided that is not going to be me.

Never again.

Right.

Never again.

Okay, now you did say, you know, that you adopted a maybe too, what, inflexible model of what it meant to be masculine as a consequence. But when I read that, I thought, yeah, but still you, fair enough, it wasn't the new you that you adopted wasn't optimal in all possible manners, but it was definitely improvement over the previous you.

Exactly. I wasn't big last again, that's for sure.

Right, well exactly. Okay, so the first thing I would say is that if you feel insecure and less and ashamed and all of that, that you have to take stock. And look, I have an exercise online at selfauthoring.com, there's three exercises there. One helps you write about the past, one about the present, and one about the future. The present authoring program helps you assess your faults and your virtues. Okay, well if you have some faults, and you feel insecure and inferior because of that, well, you should. Now, it shouldn't be so much that you're crippled by it and unable to take action. You shouldn't be beating yourself into the ground because you're not everything you could be because no one is. And if you beat yourself into the ground, then you can't get up and improve.

But.

You have to differentiate. It's like, okay, to what degree am I being hard on myself? counterproductively critical, hearing the voice of my too harsh and angry father in my head, adopting inappropriate stereotypical representations of masculine competence. How much of my self-criticism is ill-advised? Fair enough. And you want to deal with yourself with a certain amount of care. But then along with that, there's the, well, fix your weaknesses. You know, if you're ashamed of being ignorant, you're shown up at a party because, you know, you claim to knowledge that you don't have and someone exposes you. Well, you can be angry at them and you probably will, but they've actually done you a favor. They pointed out an inadequacy is a pathway that you can travel down, right? A recognized inadequacy is, as soon as it's such a gift in some sense, if it's accurate. I'm in it because you think, well, what should I do? What should I do with my life? That's a real complicated question. Oh, here's an inadequacy. Excellent. You have a goal now. Rectify it. Now you still have to think strategically and figure out how to rectify it and do it step by step. And, but Carl Rogers, the psychotherapist, pointed out that the person for therapy to be successful, the person has to want to change. So they have to have recognized that they have a problem. If someone is mandated by the court to attend therapy, it's very difficult for the therapist to convince them that they have a problem. Once you're convinced you have a problem, it's like away you go. You know, I know it's still technically difficult. It requires discipline and all of that. There's no magic solution. if you're plagued by feelings of inferiority, you should rectify the most obvious inferiorities.

Right.

Focus on those first over optimizing strengths, would you say?

No, not necessarily. Not. Not necessarily. I'm. And you don't have to redress every. Like, I can't. I'm a terrible jazz musician. You know, it's not a.

It's not a thing where you hold.

Shame around or like, well, it's not an impediment.

Yeah. Yeah.

I would say that you have to rectify an inadequacy when it's clearly an impediment to your goal, or you have to shift goals. But if you're shifting goals because of an inadequacy related impediment, then you have to ask yourself, is your desire to shift the goal reliable or are you just taking the easy way out? You can protect yourself by picking a different goal that's more difficult. That's a good mental hygiene. practice because sometimes you should switch goals rather than rectifying inadequacies. But you can fool yourself then and that's not good.

And if someone is goalless, lazy, unmotivated, not sure what they want to do, what would be a few key steps to get started to turn their life around or to find the motivation for something greater than where they're at?

Well, I think a fair bit of that's probably to be found in, you can find it in shame, you can find it in guilt, you can find it in conscience, you can find it in anger, you can find it in interest, and engagement and beauty. There's lots of pathways. If you're angry about something in the world, well, you know, that's an indication that that's in some sense your problem, right? It's speaking to you in a moral sense. This shouldn't be that way. Well, maybe you're the person who should do something about it in some manner. Maybe it'll take your whole life to figure out how to do that. But it's bothering you for a reason.

So.

The negative emotions can be a pathway to transformation. I'm not trying to romanticize them. They can crush you completely and leave you with nothing.

Yeah.

Right?

For sure. And they can go badly astray.

But.

Shame, that's a good one. What am I ashamed of? Well, can you fix any of that? Because you might ask yourself, let's say you're so ashamed and so crushed that you're nihilistic and you can't see any hope for life. You're just done. You might think, well, what if I was less ashamed? Like, I'm not going to jump off the bridge today. I'm going to wait a year. I'm going to work on these things that I'm ashamed of. And just see, like, does my life improve enough so that I'm not so bitter about it now or I'm not so hopeless about it now? And my experience has generally been that that works. It works. And then some of its practical knowledge too. It's like you can get a really long way with very small changes, incremental changes. Micro habit changes. So aim low.

Don't have big goals or big transformations.

Well, you can, but the problem with a big goal is that it's daunting enough so that it might paralyze you and there's a high probability of failure. Imagine that you're your own child. Okay, now imagine you love this child and you would like him, we'll say him because it's you and I talking, to succeed. Now you have an ideal for this child you would like him to grow up to be the best he can be, better than you, the best man he can be. That's what you want for your son. If the good part of you is talking, you definitely want him to be better than you are, but you want him to be the best he could be if your vision is unclouded. Okay, but then you offer him a goal. It's like, well, do this. Well, can he do it? Well, if he can do it without a second's thought, there's no challenge in it. There's no developmental impetus. It's not in the zone of proximal development. You want a goal that you can do, but that requires some improvement on your part. Because You want to attain the goal, that's satisfying. But then you want to make yourself into the thing that can attain goals. And so you want to push yourself. You want to push yourself a bit far.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes. And there's an ample psychological literature that suggests that that's where maximal motivation is to be found.

Interesting.

So you're pursuing a goal, but you're also pursuing the goal of transforming yourself at the same time. You're doing both of those at the same time.

Do you need to know that you're transforming yourself in order to attain the goal? Or do most people just think, I got to take these steps to make it happen, but they don't realize they're becoming better human beings?

It depends on what you mean by realize. They have the sense of satisfaction and confidence that would indicate that, although they might not be able to make what that means explicit. But I would say it would be better to make it explicit. It adds one other dimension of possible motivation.

How do you think people lose confidence? We've talked about gaining it, but how does someone, how could someone like yourself who's accomplished so much, who's got millions of followers, who, you know, is financially successful, has a great marriage, how could someone lose confidence? once they've built it.

Illness, that'll do it. That's one way. Death of someone, loss. I mean, there's lots of ways of having the rug pulled out from underneath you. Moral error. As the stakes get higher, as we already discussed, the consequences get larger. Ingratitude, that's a big one. You can succumb to the temptation to believe your own egotism. That's a big mistake. There's lots of ways that things can go sideways, that's for sure.

So it sounds like, you know, we start off with a lack of confidence. when we're pointed at, you're inadequate in this thing. And we go down a journey of, you know, building ourselves and overcoming the challenges and diving into the fear to have these small wins to build confidence. And then the more successful we become, the more we succumb to losing that confidence again when a lot more- no.

No, I wouldn't say necessarily that you become more susceptible to that. But you asked, how can that happen? How can that loss occur? I think, I still believe that genuine accomplishment, but it's always ethical accomplishment. I believe that to be the case. Genuine ethical accomplishment is the best source of security, but it's not unerring.

When you mean ethical accomplishment, do you.

Mean Doing something good right.

Whether people know about it or not, just good and right for yourself. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Or does someone else need to acknowledge that this was good and right?

I think if you've done it for yourself, that's good. But if you do it and other people are in on it and along for the ride, that's also good. And sometimes that's better to bring people along. if it's just a matter of them acknowledging it, well, there's value in that, too. I mean, you know, you. People say, well, you shouldn't care what people think of you. It's like, well, of course you should. Psychopaths don't care what people think of them. Now, you shouldn't care so much what people think about you that you're willing to lie to maintain whatever it is that you think they value. Like, there are places beyond which that becomes counterproductive. productive, clearly. But of course, well, I mean, I read the comments in YouTube particularly, and I pay attention to them. And if, you know, 30 people say something like, here's something I do, and I probably did it to you. When I'm interviewing, I interrupt more than a certain percentage of my audience would like.

That's my comments is like, you just let them speak. You interrupt too much. So I just try to shut up more now.

Do you know the joke?

What's the joke?

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

The interrupting cow. Sorry, that's a stupid joke. But it's a stupid joke. Anyhow, so, you know, I read those, and that's what people think, and. And then I. I think, okay, I should probably try to interrupt less, but I get excited and. And then with Zoom, there's a lag, and that makes it harder. But I do pay attention, and you should pay attention. I think.

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?

Are they saying two 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 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, because 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 and they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable. This guy, they want to put you in a box. They want to put a title on you. No, you're putting a title on me to make yourself feel better about yourself. If you read this book of mine and you see where I came from, this 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. 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, 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, It starts to have the one thing that we don't have is confidence. Real authentic confidence from hard work. Everything else goes away. You no longer look to other people for your self-esteem. The foundation.

That's right.

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, 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. 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 like, you're about 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.

Yeah.

And you still want to be in 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 that valedictorian study 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 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 that makes you feel good. It's gonna be a false reality. In the second life gives you that challenge, all you want to 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. 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 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. I lied. I did everything. And I still felt empty. I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires. who called me on the phone and said, 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, 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. You never examine this. Happiness peace, enlightenment. It's all up here, man. It's all up here. And I start talking like this, people go, 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. And that's the hard part.

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. Is this in Buffalo or is this in Indiana? This is 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 achieved so much. I was a Navy SEAL. I've 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. 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 so 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 where 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'd 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.

Yeah.

I was just going. I wouldn't even, I finished a race of life and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I go on.

You're like, on to the next.

I get in the car and I go.

You wouldn't even take the medal.

Gone.

Don't care about it. I'm not gonna waste an hour sitting.

Around for this ceremony. Most people sit around and that's what they like. They need the ceremony if I accomplish something. Validation.

I haven't done anything.

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. I'm just getting started. I'm just getting started. That's right. When I started figuring out life, that I was leaving so much in the tank, I caught my 40% rule. I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man, I was just dumb fat kid being bullied. And now I'm 180 pound person 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 18, 19, 20 year olds.

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 on social media. We all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine. 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 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. Yeah. 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, because at that time, I was doing what I was told. These guys needed 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. 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, and I thought I was dying, because that story is long, that sick portion of my life is long. I didn't care if I died or lived, because I was for the first time in my life, happy and at peace. Because 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, and 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 to not surface. I don't live on the surface of anything. Yeah. 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 it 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 is telling me you must 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. It's the easy route. Very few of us want to go to the right side.

That Cracker Barrel's at Midwest life.

That's right, that's right.

From Ohio, it's all about it.

Man. Everywhere.

Dude, that's amazing. Bringing back memories. This is powerful because 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. I was just like, I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid. 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 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. 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 of saying, this doesn't have control over me anymore.

It's like you can be at such 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?

It's 4,020 pull-ups in 24 hour period.

Yeah, yeah.

The first thing I did versus closing my mind, you're 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 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, 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 negative 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. And what haunts me the most, if you ask me what haunts you the most, what haunts me the 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, terminated 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 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're gonna be honored here, honored there. I'm like, God, this isn't me. Like it says David Goggins. I was an Ecolab guy, I sprayed for cockroaches and I'm 300 pounds. It said here, I'm 185. It says here, I got a bachelor's and a master's. It says all these things. And God goes, no, that's who you were supposed to be.

Wow.

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

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 CO, Captain Bowen, looked at me, I'm on crutches, I'm all jacked up. He says, hey, this is your last time you're gonna go through BUD/S. This is it. I had several stress fractures. I had double pneumonia. I was jacked up and he gave me a few months to heal. He said, this is your last time going through. I shouldn't even let you go back through. Wow. I started Navy SEAL training with stress fractures. Stress fractures.

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 would wake up at 3:30 in the morning, 4 o'clock in the morning, go to my dive cage, go in there before anybody saw me, I 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 training in the world, broken and graduate. So my mind fed off of that. You are now from the weakest man, you are now the hardest. man to ever live. If you can do this. If you can do this. Life is one big mind game. Yeah. And you're playing it with yourself. Is it true? I don't care. It got me through the hardest training, starting out broken. Where most people quit, I had just started.

Wow.

And when you take that mindset and you learn to flip that around, That's what made me powerful. And my body followed. And 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 didn't, and you don't give yourself a way out, the only way out for me at that time was death.

Wow.

I'm going to 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, 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 could 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.

'Cause 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 nother world, which is why I walk around with all my stuff in a black backpack.

Wow.

I found it a whole nother way. A whole nother 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 Scratch is what makes you better. Scratch, friction obstacles create growth. There's no friction when you're this far up in the game any more. You think there is there that's right, and you change so much the friction is minor. 'acausee why, I'm sore I'm going to get a massage to day. I'm hungry I'm going to eat to day. The refsher 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. Yeah.

How do we train ourselves to find motivation and not be lazy? Because I feel like there's a lot of laziness out there or there's moments of motivation but then it falls back into a laziness structured schedule. How do we train our minds and our body to be motivated towards a goal and not stay lazy?

Yeah.

Well, at first it's know thyself because we're all different. So, one of the attributes I talk about in the book is discipline. And what I had to do with discipline was actively separate discipline from self-discipline.

What's the difference?

Okay, well the difference is that self-discipline is internally focused. Self-discipline is about managing oneself and it has very little to do with external requirements. So, you or I can decide to get in shape, for example, and we can change our diet, we can work out every day. The external environment doesn't have a lot of say in that, in us achieving that accomplishment. So self-discipline is about managing the internal. Discipline, the way I talk about in the book, is about achieving that long-term goal. These are those long-term goals that are going to take a while to achieve and the external world has a say. So getting that promotion, writing that book, becoming the famous singer, becoming a Navy SEAL, right? The external world has, starting a podcast, right? The external world has a say in whether or not you do that, and that's, and the discipline that is required to move through those wickets takes adaptability, it takes flexibility, it takes the ability to not get seduced by the highs, the successes, and not get crushed by the failures, and then continue to move towards that goal. And what I found was, because I'm a very unself-disciplined person, I don't have a lot, right? And so I had to separate this because I've been able to achieve a lot of goals in my life. I say, what's the difference? Well, the difference is if you are overly, so those with very high self-discipline sometimes, this is not exclusive, but sometimes have trouble achieving long-term goals because the achievement of long-term goals often takes an ability and by necessity to march into the unknown, into uncertainty. which is going to throw you off routine and throw you out of certainty. The self-disciplined person, the very self-disciplined likes routine, likes certainty. That's how it's structure. I mean, that's what it is. And so moving towards a goal like that takes oftentimes being able to adapt out of structure and say, well, I can't do that. I have to just go in, I have to go in unknowing. Now, the best, the most successful people are those who have both self-discipline and discipline. In terms of staying motivated for a goal, the way I would do it by knowing myself is I would, understanding I'm not a very self-disciplined person, I would simply try to chunk a goal into smaller pieces. So if I want to lose weight, then I can say, well, that's why cheat days are actually good for me. Because I can say, I'm going to take this piece of it and move. So I chunk my reward system in a different way, but I I think the way one stays motivated towards a goal is highly subjective, but it would, in my kind of through my thought process and my experience, involve one to actively map out a reward system that helps someone move through that.

So, creating a reward system first.

For.

The goal in order to help you stay motivated.

Depending on how you show up.

Not to say like, okay, my goal is to achieve this thing, it's going to take me three years to accomplish it. Right. And that's the only reward I'm going to get in those three years. But how can I reward myself every day for an action I take every month, for a milestone every year, for getting closer? So focusing on the reward system.

And this is neurobiological because dopamine, the neurotransmitter, is You get hits of dopamine as a reward when you achieve things. There's many ways you get dopamine, but one of the ways is when you achieve things. So if you're able to effectively create a reward system that means something to you, it can't be kind of inert. So if I want to run a marathon and I can barely run to my mailbox, then maybe buying some running shoes and putting them on one morning is enough of a reward system to get a dopamine hit. As someone who runs, you know, somewhat frequently, and you probably identify with this, just putting on our shoes one morning is probably not going to give us that dopamine hit. We've got to extend that task a.

Little bit so that-- you-'ve already accomplished a lot of something.

You have to push beyond that. You have to push beyond it to.

Get that reward system, so it becomes subjective. What would you say, 20 years as a Navy SEAL at different levels, and you were deployed how many different times?

Are you allowed to talk about that? Well, I mean, 13 and some change.

Deployments between, what, six months and over a year?

Yeah, I never did year long, but anywhere between three months to six months usually.

This is Iraq and Afghanistan?

For the most part.

And other places, maybe not a lot of talk about. What would you say of that 20-year experience was the most challenging experience for you? Was it something within, A mission? Was it learning how to develop as a leader? Was it having a relationship with your wife during that time? What was the most challenging point for you?

Yeah.

The most challenging thing, ironically, wasn't the job because we were all so prepared for the job. We were around just the best people in the world. So the trust and the camaraderie was to this day. I look back on it very fondly.

So not the day-to-day job. No. the missions you went out on?

Yeah, that wasn't challenging. I think if I were to say, the first and foremost was probably having to leave the family. When you have to say goodbye to your family for a stint, whether it's three months or six months, or some folks are deploying for a year, that is a rough deal that not many people can capture. Not many people with families can capture that when you have to say goodbye to your kids. and your wife for that, you know, okay, well see you in however. And then to add on to that, understanding their stress, or at least my kids were a little bit smaller, but understanding my wife's stress, knowing that I was going someplace and she was dealing with contact. It was dangerous. Luckily with today's technology, contact was fairly easy, but we found, again, ironically, we found that daily contact was never a good idea, because what happens is you establish a routine. You get comfortable. You get comfortable, so something happens, I'm working, I'm overseas in something, I have a mission that goes long or whatever, and I don't get to call her that day, well suddenly she's worried. And it also makes time actually seem slower.

Interesting.

Yeah, so we decided we were only gonna talk usually once a week. My son who had real trouble, he was young. I mean he was born in '05, so by the time he was two he was having trouble with me deploying. And every time I went it was rough on him. And we actually for him, we actually almost had to Well, we literally had to just decide not to, I was not going to talk to him on the phone. It was too hard for him. He had to basically kind of forget me.

Oh my gosh. So he had to compartmentalize as a.

Child in order to-- We had to help him compartmentalize.

Survive. And not go depressed or be stressed, because that's one of the attributes you talk about is compartmentalization. How do you do that if you're an emotional human being that's, you have these deep connections to your family and friends, How do you just detach in a sense and become more machine-like for a period of time and then allow yourself to feel deeply in other moments?

Well, it never goes away. I think the attributes, the way I talk about compartmentalization and the attribute is more surrounded by the way our brain functions and processes information versus I'm going to block something out so I don't have to think about it.

However.

I think most team guys, SEALs, Spec Ops guys have a very high ability to compartmentalize away from things, block out things that are painful. I know that about me, and I know that about my buddies, because you have to, because war sucks. And at the end of the day, the mission has to be accomplished. So if something gnarly happens on a mission, you can't sit there. These movies that show these extended scenes of people mourning when their body goes down or whatever, like, oh my God.

You don't have that.

No, you don't have that time. You have to win the gunfight, right? Because if you don't, then all of you won't make it home, right? So you have to, and I think the training allows you to do that. The training is so intense and.

So.

Effective that it requires you to compartmentalize. Training teaches you to compartmentalize. You become very, very good at it. Now, that can be a detriment in a relationship. So, I think those of us who were able to recognize that actively try not to do that with our families. And so, it becomes much more of a precision tool versus a frenetic thing that just happens without us having control over it.

The moment that was the scariest for you when you were deployed, where you thought like, I may not make it. Or our team may not make it, or this is a really bad, I guess you're training for bad situations all the time.

Yeah.

But was there ever a moment you were like, I don't know if we're gonna get out of this?

No, I was fortunate not to have that moment. I say that with immense gratitude because I know there's a lot of friends of mine who didn't have that that can't say that. They had those moments where they said that. But no, I was fortunate enough to be always in a position, and my team was always in a position, that we had prepared, planned, and executed in a way that was highly effective so that when things went wrong, because things always go sideways, we had complete, or near complete, control, or we understood the pathways we needed to go throughout it. But I say that also, this comes back to compartmentalization. One of the things that you have to be able to do when goes sideways is to not focus on that thought you just brought up. The focus is not, oh my God, I don't think I'm gonna get out of this. Focus is how do I get out of this? So the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability. So that's how information is coming in. how we're processing it and prioritizing, how we're switching between the necessary tasks and then how we're learning from our decisions. So I talk about the parachute malfunction in the context of that. But ultimately comes to even be able to do that in the first place, it requires a forebrain dominance in the sense that you're not letting your autonomic system take over into a fight-flight response and you're able to think through stress, challenge, and uncertainty in the sense that say, okay, what what can I control right now? And this is where trust in your teammates comes in because now I have a team. I can say this with great pride and gratitude. I can remember literally walking in areas when we were overseas and thinking, man, this is a bad area.

Sketchy.

This is sketchy and having complete and utter faith. Because I was around, because I was with my teammates. I was around people who just, I trusted. I knew that if something went went wrong, we'd be able to handle it. And so I think that's a necessity when you do this type of stuff.

When you're going out on a mission, what's the process like of preparing for that mission? Are you planning more for all the things that could go wrong on how to get out of that situation, or is it planning for here's exactly how we would like it to go right? But let's also have an exit plan or a plan for when things go wrong.

It's the ladder. You plan the mission as you'd like it to go, and then inside of that planning, you put together, you build contingencies within each factor.

So when this doesn't go as planned, what are the three ways to go?

Yeah, so you know, just like any athlete would understand, so a quarterback coming out of a snap would say, well, I have two or three or four plays I can fall fall back on depending on how this line shapes up, right? You have the same thing, you know, this is where experience matters. You do it over and over again. It's okay, well, as we're coming in on insertion, you know, there's a few things that could go wrong. So if this, then that, if this, then that. And you kind of do that throughout a phase, throughout the phase planning. But then there's what we call the 80-20 rule. And that is you get to 80% of certainty and then you recognize that 20% is just out of your control. And that's where confidence comes. You say, if something happens outside that 20%, we will figure it out.

Figure it out.

Because we're not going to figure out everything. And it's, you know, Murphy's Law will dictate that something happens that we haven't thought of. So you prepare yourself to deal with uncertainty.

How do you train your mind to deal with chaos in the moment so that you don't freak out and freeze up, but you actually turn on a level of focus and attention towards achieving that goal?

Yeah, so I think we're predisposed, each one of us, to what I call Huberman and I both have called this, is the autonomic set point. At what point do we start flipping into an autonomic response, into fight/flight, where our system starts taking over and our forebrain starts coming offline? If you and I use boiling point as the average, most of us might be average. There are those who start really freaking out at like 190. So 212 is the average at 190 degrees, they're starting to freak out. There are people who it takes till like 230.

To boil.

To boil, right? I think that the guys who make it through that training are predisposed to have a higher set point, first of all. In other words, we tend to, when bad things start to happen, we tend to slow down and start thinking through it versus get all hyped up.