On The Other Side Of Suffering Is Greatness | David Goggins

We always paint a fucked up reality that's not even true. It's reality what we think is true because our lives aren't what we want it to be. I realized that God wasn't going to give me a get out of jail free card. And from the time I was born into the time I was 19 years old, my life had these hurdles. I constantly hit obstacles, obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And I had to figure out how to manage suffering, how to deal with it, because it'd be part of my life forever. At least that's what I thought. So in order to deal with it, I had to be able to conquer it and overcome it and deal with it and know that in this suffering there has to be some kind of growth. With every obstacle. I look at it as friction. Now, without friction, there is no growth. You have to have friction in your life to grow. So I started looking at all these different things versus the woe is me mentality. Like, oh my God, look at my life. My life's so fucked up. I come from this fucked up family. I'm being beaten, I'm being abused, mentally, physically. I started looking at it as the perfect trial ground. So I had to flip it upside down and say, okay, I'm suffering tremendously. Mentally, use this to your advantage versus your disadvantage. So that's what I did. Versus looking at it as like, oh my God, woe is me. I'm never gonna get out of here. I looked at it, okay, hang on a second, hang on a second. If I can overcome this, if I can find some power in this, some way to get through this, that right there will be the fuel for the rest of my life. And so I found great strength in suffering, great strength in it, because why, through all of that, it started to callous my mind over the victim's mentality. This whole thing about suffering, yeah, it sucks really bad, really, really bad. But we all live on this side of suffering, on this side, this nice box that's very comfortable that we know when everything's going to happen. We are in it. It's good, we know how everything's going to turn out. It's those few people who are willing to go on the, on this side of suffering. And once they get through that, ask him how he feels now, his mind, how far he grew in that short period. He grew so much more than a normal person because he was willing to go outside himself. Because on the other end of suffering is greatness. It's not over here. So a whole bunch of us, we Put ourselves in this great box. And in that box there's no suffering in it. So what we do is we shelter ourselves from greatness. So for me, for instance, I was 300 damn pounds at one time in my life. Sprayed for cockroaches, made a thousand dollars a month. I was living in that box. I would sometimes look over the box and I saw hell, suffering storms, avalanches, tornadoes. I don't want to go over there, but I knew if I can get through that mentally. On the other side was 185 pound person who's a Navy seal, went through Ranger school. Only person to do this, only person do that, only person do this. But that's through all that, all that I have to go through. So you peek over the box and you go back in and say, oh, I'm okay being 300 pounds, thousand dollars a month, I'm okay over here. And on the other side is where you start to really start your journey. People think they start their journey because they're born. No, there's a lot of people in graves who have lived 100 years and have never started their real journey. Your real journey starts when you go outside that box and you start climbing mountains. You start climbing mountains and you think you're at the top of the mountain. You go down the other side of it thinking, I'm here. You look up, fuck, there's no other fucking mountain. And it goes and it goes on and it goes on. And just when you get ready to quit, you crest that final mountain. You get down and you look and there you are and it starts to make sense to you. Then does it make sense to you until you get outside that fucking box? I talk to so many fucking people and what I say is not for everybody. So many people don't have any clue on what the fuck I'm saying because they're in this box and it's their brain. You first must go through suffering to find that great peace we're all looking for, a lot of us want to have. There's a lot of books out there about this. Five steps. Do this, do this, do this, get there. No, man, it's not that easy to find real permanent peace in enlightenment. You must go to the dark side of who you are. I could have easily just shoved my whole life under a rug and went straight to peace. Are you happy there? You overcame nothing. You jumped hell, you skipped hell. You forego this part of your life, you skip it and go right to peace. So you always have this thing back here that's Haunting you. And that's that darkness. You must go into the darkness to truly find that light that you're looking for, because that's what's on the other side of that. People get it all wrong, man. You. You have to face suffering. You have to face this dark side, this darkness. And there's a lot of energy in there. There's a lot of goodness in there that you can use to find greatness. But you can find your peace you're looking for in yourself until you've overcome yourself. I think that when you die, this is my own mindset, that you arrive in line. It helps me to get past a lot of things. You. You arrive in line, and let's say you're in front. Let's say you die right before me, and you're in line, and God's sitting there with a clipboard, okay? Sitting there with a clipboard like me. And you're sitting right now, he's looking at you and he says, hey, you made it to heaven. Good job. Okay? And then he shows you the clipboard of what your life should have. So you live this life that you thought you pushed so hard. Then you look at a clipboard. Let's say myself. This is now me. I'm talking about myself. Now. Let's say I got to heaven weighing 300 pounds. I was a guy that worked for ecolab, which is a guy that kills cockroaches for a living, which is fine. It's a job. But then I look at this, and that's how I died. I look at this, and it says on here where I should have been. Because God's all knowing, right? I look at this, and it said, you should have been £185. You should have broke Ginsburg of world's record. You should have been a Navy seal. You should have been this, you should have been that. You should have lived this great life. You should have been an inspiration. You should inspire millions. And then you get the clipboard back to God. Let's say you lived 80 years on Earth and now you realize that you lived here being a shell of who the fuck you should have been. Now you're in heaven, but are you really in heaven? Because now you see how much you left down there on earth. The root cause of the quitter isn't that you can't do 100 fucking push ups. You can train anybody to do that. The root cause of the quitt is when you get in hell. You can't process it. It's too much to process because your mind starts going back to the real reality of, like, I'm not ready. I'm not good enough. It's not trained. So I started training this, realizing that the only thing that makes me quit is not the muscle fatigue, it's the mental fatigue that makes me quit everything in life. So I became a practitioner of the mind. The mind is a very powerful thing. It has a tactical advantage over all the time. It knows your fears, right? It knows your insecurities. It knows where you don't want to go. So it will guide you away from that. And that's why the mind will always win until you reprogram will always win until you reprogram it. Because the mind controls you. Why is that? It's your mind. It's your mind because all those things that happen to you in your life, all those bad things, all those things that you blame other people for, they're now yours to own. You gotta figure out a way to reprogram your mind to get outside the box.