How to 20x Your Potential with Mark Divine | Ramit's Brain Trust

Hey everybody, Ramit Sethi here from I Will Teach youh to Be Rich and Ramit's Brain Trust. Today we're talking peak performance. We always talk about top performers but if you notice it's usually related to this. It's cerebral, it's intellectual, it's focusing on personal finance or entrepreneurship or finding a job. Well today we want to expand the definition of top performance and we're going to go to someone very special. He's a former Navy seal, he's an entrepreneur, owns multiple businesses and he's going to take us deep inside the world of top performance. Let's welcome Mark Devine.

Commander Mark Devine here. Looking forward to teaching you how to develop resiliency, mental toughness, find your 20x potential. I'm the founder of Seal Fit, the author of the Way of the SEAL An Unbeatable Mind. And I've trained thousands of Navy SEALs to succeed in the most demanding training program on earth.

Oh yah, thank you for being here. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. Thank you. So you mentioned something just now. You said 20x your potential, right? What does that mean?

One of the things that an instructor told me, right on the verge of Hell Week during my SEAL training, which seems like 100 years ago now, but he said, you know, Hell Week is six days of non stop training. It's generally considered the most arduous period of military training, you know, in any special ops branch in the world. Six days, no sleep, around the clock training. So he told me before going to the said, you know, Ensign Devine, don't worry about this, this is an easy day. You're capable of 20 times what you think you are. And so you know, I just kind of lodged in the back of my head. What is he talking about? Anyways, so I embarked on this training. You know, we start going through it and the class, you know, starts whittling down, people quitting left and right and we're going non stop. It's Tuesday night, we start on Sunday and now it's Monday night and then Tuesday night and we are down from, you know, originally our class was 180 students and then we're down to 80 before hell week and then we were down to like 40 by Tuesday. And they're dropping, dropping, dropping. And what I noticed is the, that I started to get stronger by Wednesday I was getting more alert. Now this was largely my mind probably playing tricks on me, but my body also started to get stronger. I actually started to develop muscle mass. So by Thursday of Hell Week I was developing muscle mass, and I was starting to feel really strong, both physically, mentally, and emotionally. And it was an extraordinary experience. And I followed that away. And now, many years later, it's become one of the primary principles that I teach that you, you know, the human being and the human body and mind system is extraordinary, and you can unlock that potential. And I call that 20x potential.

So this is fascinating. We're going to dive into this because I agree 100% that we are capable of so much more. And often it takes a nudge from someone outside of us to show us what's possible.

Or a nudge from something inside of you.

Exactly. I remember in my own just simple experience, I remember doing a certain workout, and I was halfway through it, and I thought, there's no way I can even finish this. And the trainer I was working with, he said, okay, we're going to add.

Some more weight on.

And he puts tons of weight on. And I didn't even think I could have finished the first workout, much less that, but I did. And it was that simple act that I realized, wow, had someone not pushed me, I would have stayed static for a whole life.