cant_hurt_me.md

Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

Author: David Goggins
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INTRODUCTION Do you know who you really are and what you’re capable of? I’m sure you think so, but just because you believe something doesn’t make it true.

Denial is the ultimate comfort zone.

Don’t worry, you aren’t alone. In every town, in every country, all over the world, millions roam the streets, dead-eyed as zombies, addicted to comfort, embracing a victim’s mentality and unaware of their true potential. I know this because I meet and hear from them all the time, and because just like you, I used to be one of them.

Heraclitus, a philosopher born in the Persian Empire back in the fifth century BC, had it right when he wrote about men on the battlefield. “Out of every one hundred men,” he wrote, “ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior…”

I hope you’re ready. It’s time to go to war with yourself.

CHAPTER TWO 2. TRUTH HURTS

That night, after taking a shower, I wiped the steam away from our corroded bathroom mirror and took a good look. I didn’t like who I saw staring back. I was a low-budget thug with no purpose and no future. I felt so disgusted I wanted to punch that motherfucker in the face and shatter glass. Instead, I lectured him. It was time to get real. “Look at you,” I said. “Why do you think the Air Force wants your punk ass? You stand for nothing. You are an embarrassment.” I reached for the shaving cream, smoothed a thin coat over my face, unwrapped a fresh razor and kept talking as I shaved. “You are one dumb motherfucker. You read like a third grader. You’re a fucking joke! You’ve never tried hard at anything in your life besides basketball, and you have goals? That’s fucking hilarious.” After shaving peach fuzz from my cheeks and chin, I lathered up my scalp. I was desperate for a change. I wanted to become someone new. “You don’t see people in the military sagging their pants. You need to stop talking like a wanna-be-gangster. None of this shit is gonna cut it! No more taking the easy way out! It’s time to grow the fuck up!” Steam billowed all around me. It rippled off my skin and poured from my soul. What started as a spontaneous venting session had become a solo intervention. “It’s on you,” I said. “Yeah, I know shit is fucked up. I know what you’ve been through. I was there, bitch! Merry fucking Christmas. Nobody is coming to save your ass! Not your mommy, not Wilmoth. Nobody! It’s up to you!” By the time I was done talking, I was shaved clean. Water pearled on my scalp, streamed from my forehead, and dripped down the bridge of my nose. I looked different, and for the first time, I’d held myself accountable. A new ritual was born, one that stayed with me for years. It would help me get my grades up, whip my sorry ass into shape, and see me through graduation and into the Air Force. The ritual was simple. I’d shave my face and scalp every night, get loud, and get real. I set goals, wrote them on Post-It notes, and tagged them to what I now call the Accountability Mirror, because each day I’d hold myself accountable to the goals I’d set. At first my goals involved shaping up my appearance and accomplishing all my chores without having to be asked. Make your bed like you’re in the military every day! Pull up your pants! Shave your head every morning! Cut the grass! Wash all dishes! The Accountability Mirror kept me on point from then on, and though I was still young when this strategy came through me, since then I’ve found it useful for people at any stage in life. You could be on the cusp of retirement, looking to reinvent yourself. Maybe you’re going through a bad break-up or have gained weight. Perhaps you’re permanently disabled, overcoming some other injury, or are just coming to grips with how much of your life you’ve wasted, living without purpose. In each case, that negativity you’re feeling is your internal desire for change, but change doesn’t come easy, and the reason this ritual worked so well for me was because of my tone. I wasn’t fluffy. I was raw because that was the only way to get myself right. That summer between my junior and senior year in high school I was afraid. I was insecure. I wasn’t a smart kid. I’d blown off all accountability for my entire teenage existence, and actually thought I was getting over on all the adults in my life, getting over on the system. I’d duped myself into a negative feedback loop of cheating and scamming that on the surface looked like advancement until I hit a brick fucking wall called reality. That night when I came home and read the letter from my school, there was no denying the truth, and I delivered it hard. I didn’t dance around and say, “Geez, David, you are not taking your education very seriously.” No, I had to own it in the raw because the only way we can change is to be real with ourselves. If you don’t know shit and have never taken school seriously, then say, “I’m dumb!” Tell yourself that you need to get your ass to work because you’re falling behind in life! If you look in the mirror and you see a fat person, don’t tell yourself that you need to lose a couple of pounds. Tell the truth. You’re fucking fat! It’s okay. Just say you’re fat if you’re fat. The dirty mirror that you see every day is going to tell you the truth every time, so why are you still lying to yourself? So you can feel better for a few minutes and stay the fucking same? If you’re fat you need to change the fact that you’re fat because it’s very fucking unhealthy. I know because I’ve been there. If you have worked for thirty years doing the same shit you’ve hated day in and day out because you were afraid to quit and take a risk, you’ve been living like a pussy. Period, point blank. Tell yourself the truth! That you’ve wasted enough time, and that you have other dreams that will take courage to realize, so you don’t die a fucking pussy. Call yourself out!

But if you are the only, and you aren’t stuck in some real-world genocidal twilight zone, you’d better get real too. Your life is not fucked up because of overt racists or hidden systemic racism. You aren’t missing out on opportunities, making shit money, and getting evicted because of America or Donald fucking Trump or because your ancestors were slaves or because some people hate immigrants or Jews or harass women or believe gay people are going to hell. If any of that shit is stopping you from excelling in life, I’ve got some news. You are stopping you! You are giving up instead of getting hard! Tell the truth about the real reasons for your limitations and you will turn that negativity, which is real, into jet fuel. Those odds stacked against you will become a damn runway!

The morning after that first session with the Accountability Mirror, I trashed the shag steering wheel and the fuzzy dice. I tucked my shirt in and wore my pants with a belt, and, once school started up again, I stopped eating at my lunch table. For the first time, being liked and acting cool were a waste of my time, and instead of eating with all the popular kids, I found my own table and ate alone. Mind you, the rest of my progress could not be described as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it metamorphosis. Lady Luck did not suddenly show up, run me a hot soapy bath, and kiss me like she loved me. In fact, the only reason I didn’t become just another statistic is because, at the last possible moment, I got to work. During my senior year in high school, all I cared about was working out, playing basketball, and studying, and it was the Accountability Mirror that kept me motivated to keep pushing toward something better. I woke up before dawn and started going to the YMCA most mornings at 5 a.m. before school to hit the weights. I ran all the damn time, usually around the local golf course after dark. One night I ran thirteen miles—the most I’d ever run in my entire life. On that run I came to a familiar intersection. It was the same street where that redneck had pulled a gun on me. I avoided it and ran on, covering a half mile in the opposite direction before something told me to turn back. When I arrived at that intersection a second time, I stopped and contemplated it. I was scared shitless of that street, my heart was leaping from my chest, which is exactly why I suddenly started charging down its fucking throat. Within seconds, two snarling dogs got loose and chased me as the woods leaned in on both sides. It was all I could do to stay a step ahead of the beasts. I kept expecting that truck to reappear and run me the fuck down, like some scene from Mississippi circa 1965, but I kept running, faster and faster, until I was breathless. Eventually the hounds of Hell gave up and loped off, and it was just me, the rhythm and steam of my breath, and that deep country quiet. It was cleansing. By the time I turned back, my fear was gone. I owned that fucking street. From then on, I brainwashed myself into craving discomfort. If it was raining, I would go run. Whenever it started snowing, my mind would say, Get your fucking running shoes on. Sometimes I wussed out and had to deal with it at the Accountability Mirror. But facing that mirror, facing myself, motivated me to fight through uncomfortable experiences, and, as a result, I became tougher. And being tough and resilient helped me meet my goals.

CHAPTER THREE 3. THE IMPOSSIBLE TASK

They say there’s always light at the end of the tunnel, but not once your eyes adjust to the darkness, and that’s what happened to me. I was numb. Numb to my life, miserable in my marriage, and I’d accepted that reality. I was a would-be warrior turned cockroach sniper on the graveyard shift. Just another zombie selling his time on earth, going through the motions. In fact, the only insight I had into my job at that time was that it was actually a step up.

I hung up, flipped on the television, and stomped down the hall to the shower, where I could hear a narrator’s voice filter through the steam. I caught snippets. “Navy SEALs…toughest…the world.” I wrapped a towel around my waist and rushed back into the living room. I was so big, the towel barely covered my fat ass, but I sat down on the couch and didn’t move for thirty minutes. The show followed Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL (BUD/S) Training Class 224 through Hell Week: the most arduous series of tasks in the most physically demanding training in the military. I watched men sweat and suffer as they tore through muddy obstacle courses, ran on the soft sand holding logs overhead, and shivered in icy surf. Sweat pearled on my scalp, I was literally on the edge of my seat as I saw guys—some of the strongest of them all—ring the bell and quit. Made sense. Only one-third of the men who begin BUD/S make it through Hell Week, and in all of my time in Pararescue training, I couldn’t remember feeling as awful as these men looked. They were swollen, chafed, sleep-deprived, and dead on their feet, and I was jealous of them. The longer I watched the more certain I became that there were answers buried in all that suffering. Answers that I needed. More than once the camera panned over the endless frothing ocean, and each time I felt pathetic. The SEALs were everything I wasn’t. They were about pride, dignity, and the type of excellence that came from bathing in the fire, getting beat the fuck down, and going back for more, again and again. They were the human equivalent of the hardest, sharpest sword you could imagine. They sought out the flame, took the pounding for as long as necessary, longer even, until they were fearless and deadly. They weren’t motivated. They were driven. The show ended with graduation. Twenty-two proud men stood shoulder to shoulder in their dress whites before the camera pushed in on their Commanding Officer. “In a society where mediocrity is too often the standard and too often rewarded,” he said, “there is intense fascination with men who detest mediocrity, who refuse to define themselves in conventional terms, and who seek to transcend traditionally recognized human capabilities. This is exactly the type of person BUD/S is meant to find. The man who finds a way to complete each and every task to the best of his ability. The man who will adapt and overcome any and all obstacles.” In that moment it felt as though the Commanding Officer was talking directly to me, but after the show ended I walked back to the bathroom, faced the mirror, and stared myself down. I looked every bit of 300 pounds. I was everything all the haters back home said I would be: uneducated, with no real world skills, zero discipline, and a dead-end future. Mediocrity would have been a major promotion. I was at the bottom of the barrel of life, pooling in the dregs, but, for the first time in way too long, I was awake. I barely spoke to my mother during breakfast, and only ate half my staple because my mind was on unfinished business. I’d always wanted to join an elite special operations unit, and beneath all the rolls of flesh and layers of failure, that desire was still there. Now it was coming back to life, thanks to a chance viewing of a show that continued to work on me like a virus moving cell to cell, taking over.

I had less than three months to lose 106 pounds. It sounded like an impossible task, which is one reason I didn’t quit my job. The other was the ASVAB. That nightmare test had come back to life like Frankenstein’s fucking monster. I’d passed it once before to enlist in the Air Force, but to qualify for BUD/S I’d have to score much higher. For two weeks I studied all day and zapped pests each night. I wasn’t working out yet. Serious weight loss would have to wait. I took the test on a Saturday afternoon. The following Monday I called Schaljo. “Welcome to the Navy,” he said. He downloaded the good news first. I’d done exceptionally well on some sections and was now officially a reservist, but I’d only scored a 44 on Mechanical Comprehension. To qualify for BUD/S I needed a 50. I’d have to retake the entire test in five weeks. These days Steven Schaljo likes to call our chance connection “fate.” He said he could sense my drive the first moment we spoke, and that he believed in me from the jump, which is why my weight wasn’t an issue for him, but after that ASVAB test I was full of doubt. So maybe what happened later that night was also a form of fate, or a much needed dose of divine intervention. I’m not going to drop the name of the restaurant where it went down because if I did you’d never eat there again and I’d have to hire a lawyer. Just know, this place was a disaster. I checked the traps outside first and found a dead rat. Inside, there were more dead rodents—a mouse and two rats—on the sticky traps, and roaches in the garbage which hadn’t been emptied. I shook my head, got down on my knees under the sink, and sprayed up through a narrow gap in the wall. I didn’t know it yet, but I’d found their nesting column and when the poison hit they started to scatter. Within seconds there was a skittering across the back of my neck. I brushed it off, and craned my neck to see a storm of roaches raining down to the kitchen floor from an open panel in the ceiling. I’d hit the motherlode of cockroaches and the worst infestation I ever saw on the job for Ecolab. They kept coming. Roaches landed on my shoulders and my head. The floor was writhing with them. I left my canister in the kitchen, grabbed the sticky traps, and burst outside. I needed fresh air and more time to figure out how I was going to clear the restaurant of vermin. I considered my options on my way to the dumpster to trash the rodents, opened the lid, and found a live raccoon, hissing mad. He bared his yellow teeth and lunged at me. I slammed the dumpster shut. What the fuck? I mean, seriously, what the fucking fuck? When was enough truly going to be enough? Was I willing to let my sorry present become a fucked-up future? How much longer would I wait, how many more years would I burn, wondering if there was some greater purpose out there waiting for me? I knew right then that if I didn’t make a stand and start walking the path of most resistance, I would end up in this mental hell forever. I didn’t go back inside that restaurant. I didn’t collect my gear. I started my truck, stopped for a chocolate shake—my comfort tea at that time—and drove home. It was still dark when I pulled up. I didn’t care. I stripped off my work clothes, put on some sweats and laced up my running shoes. I hadn’t run in over a year, but I hit the streets ready to go four miles. I lasted 400 yards. My heart raced. I was so dizzy I had to sit down on the edge of the golf course to catch my breath before making the slow walk back to my house, where my melted shake was waiting to comfort me in yet another failure. I grabbed it, slurped, and slumped into my sofa. My eyes welled with tears. Who the fuck did I think I was? I was born nothing, I’d proven nothing, and I still wasn’t worth a damn thing. David Goggins, a Navy SEAL? Yeah, right. What a pipe dream. I couldn’t even run down the block for five minutes. All my fears and insecurities I’d bottled up for my entire life started raining down on my head. I was on the verge of giving in and giving up for good. That’s when I found my old, beat to shit VHS copy of Rocky (the one I’d had for fifteen years), slid it into the machine, and fast forwarded to my favorite scene: Round 14. The original Rocky is still one of my all-time favorite films because it’s about a know-nothing journeyman fighter living in poverty with no prospects. Even his own trainer won’t work with him. Then, out of the blue, he’s given a title shot with the champion, Apollo Creed, the most feared fighter in history, a man that has knocked out every opponent he’s ever faced. All Rocky wants is to be the first to go the distance with Creed. That alone will make him someone he could be proud of for the first time in his life. The fight is closer than anyone anticipated, bloody and intense, and by the middle rounds Rocky is taking on more and more punishment. He’s losing the fight, and in Round 14 he gets knocked down early, but pops right back up in the center of the ring. Apollo moves in, stalking him like a lion. He throws sharp left jabs, hits a slow-footed Rocky with a staggering combination, lands a punishing right hook, and another. He backs Rocky into a corner. Rocky’s legs are jelly. He can’t even muster the strength to raise his arms in defense. Apollo slams another right hook into the side of Rocky’s head, then a left hook, and a vicious right-handed uppercut that puts Rocky down. Apollo retreats to the opposite corner with his arms held high, but even face down in that ring, Rocky doesn’t give up. As the referee begins his ten-count, Rocky squirms toward the ropes. Mickey, his own trainer, urges him to stay down, but Rocky isn’t hearing it. He pulls himself up to one knee, then all fours. The referee hits six as Rocky grabs the ropes and rises up. The crowd roars, and Apollo turns to see him still standing. Rocky waves Apollo over. The champ’s shoulders slump in disbelief. The fight isn’t over yet. I turned off the television and thought about my own life. It was a life devoid of any drive and passion, but I knew if I continued to surrender to my fear and my feelings of inadequacy, I would be allowing them to dictate my future forever. My only other choice was to try to find the power in the emotions that had laid me low, harness and use them to empower me to rise up, which is exactly what I did. I dumped that shake in the trash, laced up my shoes, and hit the streets again. On my first run, I felt severe pain in my legs and my lungs at a quarter mile. My heart raced and I stopped. This time I felt the same pain, my heart raced like a car running hot, but I ran through it and the pain faded. By the time I bent over to catch my breath, I’d run a full mile. That’s when I first realized that not all physical and mental limitations are real, and that I had a habit of giving up way too soon. I also knew that it would take every ounce of courage and toughness I could muster to pull off the impossible. I was staring at hours, days, and weeks of non-stop suffering. I would have to push myself to the very edge of my mortality. I had to accept the very real possibility that I might die because this time I wouldn’t quit, no matter how fast my heart raced and no matter how much pain I was in. Trouble was there was no battle plan to follow, no blueprint. I had to create one from scratch. The typical day went something like this. I’d wake up at 4:30 a.m., munch a banana, and hit the ASVAB books. Around 5 a.m., I’d take that book to my stationary bike where I’d sweat and study for two hours. Remember, my body was a mess. I couldn’t run multiple miles yet, so I had to burn as many calories as I could on the bike. After that I’d drive over to Carmel High School and jump into the pool for a two-hour swim. From there I hit the gym for a circuit workout that included the bench press, the incline press, and lots of leg exercises. Bulk was the enemy. I needed reps, and I did five or six sets of 100–200 reps each. Then it was back to the stationary bike for two more hours. I was constantly hungry. Dinner was my one true meal each day, but there wasn’t much to it. I ate a grilled or sautéed chicken breast and some sautéed vegetables along with a thimble of rice. After dinner I’d do another two hours on the bike, hit the sack, wake up and do it all over again, knowing the odds were stacked sky high against me. What I was trying to achieve is like a D-student applying to Harvard, or walking into a casino and putting every single dollar you own on a number in roulette and acting as if winning is a foregone conclusion. I was betting everything I had on myself with no guarantees. I weighed myself twice daily, and within two weeks I’d dropped twenty-five pounds. My progress only improved as I kept grinding, and the weight started peeling off. Ten days later I was at 250, light enough to begin doing push-ups, pull-ups, and to start running my ass off. I’d still wake up, hit the stationary bike, the pool, and the gym, but I also incorporated two-, three-, and four-mile runs. I ditched my running shoes and ordered a pair of Bates Lites, the same boots SEAL candidates wear in BUD/S, and started running in those.

I had the Rocky soundtrack on cassette and I’d listen to Going the Distance for inspiration. On long bike rides and runs, with those horns blasting in my brain, I’d imagine myself going through BUD/S, diving into cold water, and crushing Hell Week. I was wishing, I was hoping, but by the time I was down to 250, my quest to qualify for the SEALs wasn’t a daydream anymore. I had a real chance to accomplish something most people, including myself, thought was impossible. Still, there were bad days. One morning not long after I dipped below 250, I weighed in and had only lost a pound from the day before. I had so much weight to lose I could not afford to plateau. That’s all I thought about while running six miles and swimming two. I was exhausted and sore when I arrived in the gym for my typical three-hour circuit. After rocking over 100 pull-ups in a series of sets, I was back on the bar for a max set with no ceiling. Going in, my goal was to get to twelve but my hands were burning fire as I stretched my chin over the bar for the tenth time. For weeks, the temptation to pull back had been ever present, and I always refused. That day, however, the pain was too much and after my eleventh pull-up, I gave in, dropped down, and finished my workout, one pull-up shy. That one rep stayed with me, along with that one pound. I tried to get them out of my head but they wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone. They taunted me on the drive home, and at my kitchen table while I ate a sliver of grilled chicken and a bland, baked potato. I knew I wouldn’t sleep that night unless I did something about it, so I grabbed my keys. “You cut corners and you are not gonna fucking make it,” I said, out loud, as I drove back to the gym. “There are no shortcuts for you, Goggins!” I did my entire pull-up workout over again. One missed pull-up cost me an extra 250, and there would be similar episodes. Whenever I cut a run or swim short because I was hungry or tired, I’d always go back and beat myself down even harder. That was the only way I could manage the demons in my mind. Either way there would be suffering. I had to choose between physical suffering in the moment, and the mental anguish of wondering if that one missed pull-up, that last lap in the pool, the quarter mile I skipped on the road or trail, would end up costing me an opportunity of a lifetime. It was an easy choice. When it came to the SEALs, I wasn’t leaving anything up to chance.

...administrator’s computer at the front of the room where the score would be tabulated instantly. I peeked over my monitor and saw him sitting there, waiting. I pointed, clicked, and left the room. Buzzing with nervous energy, I paced the parking lot for a few minutes before finally ducking into my Honda Accord, but I didn’t start the engine. I couldn’t leave. I sat in the front seat for fifteen minutes with a thousand-yard stare. It would be at least two days before Schaljo would call with my results, but the answer to the riddle that was my future was already solved. I knew exactly where it was, and I had to know the truth. I gathered myself, walked back in, and approached the fortune teller. “You gotta tell me what I got on this fucking test, man,” I said. He peered up at me, surprised, but he didn’t buckle. “I’m sorry, son. This is the government. There’s a system for how they do things,” he said. “I didn’t make the rules and I can’t bend them.” “Sir, you have no idea what this test means to me, to my life. It’s everything!” He looked into my glassy eyes for what felt like five minutes, then turned toward his machine. “I’m breaking every rule in the book right now,” he said. “Goggins, right?” I nodded and came around behind his seat as he scrolled through files. “There you are. Congratulations, you scored 65. That’s a great score.” He was referencing my overall, but I didn’t care about that. Everything hinged on my getting a 50-spot where it counted most. “What did I get on mechanical comprehension?” He shrugged, clicked and scrolled, and there it was. My new favorite number glowed on his screen: 50. “YES!” I shouted. “YES! YES!” There was still a handful of others taking the test, but this was the happiest moment in my life and I couldn’t stifle it. I kept screaming “YES!” at the top of my lungs. The administrator damn near fell out of his chair and everyone in that room stared at me like I was crazy. If they only knew how crazed I’d been! For two months I’d dedicated my entire existence to this one moment, and I was damn well gonna enjoy it. I rushed to my car and screamed some more. “FUCK YEAH!” On my drive home I called my mom. She was the one person, aside from Schaljo, who witnessed my metamorphosis. “I fucking did it,” I told her, tears in my eyes. “I fucking did it! I’m going to be a SEAL.” When Schaljo came to work the next day, he got the news and called me up. He’d sent in my recruitment package and had just heard back that I was in! I could tell he was happy for me, and proud that what he saw in me the first time we met turned out to be real. But it wasn’t all happy days. My wife had given me an implied ultimatum, and now I had a decision to make. Abandon the opportunity I’d worked so hard for and stay married, or get divorced and go try to become a SEAL. In the end, my choice didn’t have anything to do with my feelings for Pam or her father. He’d apologized to me, by the way. It was about who I was and who I wanted to be. I was a prisoner in my own my mind and this opportunity was my only chance to break free. I celebrated my victory the way any SEAL candidate should. I put the fuck out. The following morning and for the next three weeks I spent time in the pool, strapped with a sixteen-pound weight belt. I swam underwater for fifty meters at a time and walked the length of the pool underwater, with a brick in each hand, all on a single breath. The water would not own my ass this time. When I was done, I’d swim a mile or two, then head to a pond near my mother’s home. Remember, this was Indiana—the American Midwest—in December. The trees were naked. Icicles hung like crystals from the eaves of houses and snow blanketed the earth in all directions, but the pond wasn’t completely frozen yet. I waded into the icy water, dressed in camo pants, a brown short sleeved t-shirt, and boots, laid back and looked into the gray sky. The hypothermic water washed over me, the pain was excruciating, and I fucking loved it. After a few minutes I got out and started running, water sloshing in my boots, sand in my underwear. Within seconds my t-shirt was frozen to my chest, my pants iced at the cuffs. I hit the Monon trail. Steam poured from my nose and mouth as I grunted and slalomed speed-walkers and joggers. Civilians. Their heads turned as I picked up speed and began sprinting, like Rocky in downtown Philly. I ran as fast as I could for as long as I could, from a past that no longer defined me, toward a future undetermined. All I knew was that there would be pain and there would be purpose. And that I was ready. CHALLENGE #3 The first step on the journey toward a calloused mind is stepping outside your comfort zone on a regular basis. Dig out your journal again and write down all the things you don’t like to do or that make you uncomfortable. Especially those things you know are good for you. Now go do one of them, and do it again. In the coming pages, I’ll be asking you to mirror what you just read to some degree, but there is no need for you to find your own impossible task and achieve it on the fast track. This is not about changing your life instantly, it’s about moving the needle bit by bit and making those changes sustainable. That means digging down to the micro level and doing something that sucks every day. Even if it’s as simple as making your bed, doing the dishes, ironing your clothes, or getting up before dawn and running two miles each day. Once that becomes comfortable, take it to five, then ten miles. If you already do all those things, find something you aren’t doing. We all have areas in our lives we either ignore or can improve upon. Find yours. We often choose to focus on our strengths rather than our weaknesses. Use this time to make your weaknesses your strengths.

CHAPTER FOUR 4. TAKING SOULS

When you’re that cold and stressed, the mind cannot comprehend the next 120-plus hours. Five and a half days without sleep cannot be broken up into small pieces. There is no way to systematically attack it, which is why every single person who has ever tried to become a SEAL has asked himself one simple question during their first dose of surf torture: “Why am I here?” Those innocuous words bubbled up in our spinning minds each time we got sucked under a monster wave at midnight, when we were already borderline hypothermic. Because nobody has to become a SEAL. We weren’t fucking drafted. Becoming a SEAL is a choice. And what that single softball question revealed in the heat of battle is that each second we remained in training was also a choice, which made the entire notion of becoming a SEAL seem like masochism. It’s voluntary torture. And that makes no sense at all to the rational mind, which is why those four words unravel so many men.

Since that night in Hell Week, I’ve deployed the Taking Souls concept countless times. Taking Souls is a ticket to finding your own reserve power and riding a second wind. It’s the tool you can call upon to win any competition or overcome every life obstacle. You can utilize it to win a chess match, or conquer an adversary in a game of office politics. It can help you rock a job interview or excel at school. And yes, it can be used to conquer all manner of physical challenges, but remember, this is a game you are playing within yourself. Unless you’re engaged in physical competition, I’m not suggesting that you try to dominate someone or crush their spirit. In fact, they never even need to know you’re playing this game. This is a tactic for you to be your best when duty calls. It’s a mind game you’re playing on yourself. Taking someone’s soul means you’ve gained a tactical advantage. Life is all about looking for tactical advantages, which is why we stole the Hell Week schedule, why we nipped Psycho’s heels on that run, and why I made a show of myself in the surf, humming the Platoon theme song. Each of those incidents was an act of defiance that empowered us. But defiance isn’t always the best way to take someone’s soul. It all depends upon your terrain. During BUD/S, the instructors didn’t mind if you looked for advantages like that. They respected it as long as you were also kicking ass. You must do your own homework. Know the terrain you’re operating in, when and where you can push boundaries, and when you should fall in line. Next, take inventory of your mind and body on the eve of battle. List out your insecurities and weakness, as well as your opponent’s. For instance, if you’re getting bullied, and you know where you fall short or feel insecure, you can stay ahead of any insults or barbs a bully may throw your way. You can laugh at yourself along with them, which disempowers them. If you take what they do or say less personally, they no longer hold any cards. Feelings are just feelings. On the other hand, people who are secure with themselves don’t bully other people. They look out for other people, so if you’re getting bullied you know that you’re dealing with someone who has problem areas you can exploit or soothe. Sometimes the best way to defeat a bully is to actually help them. If you can think two or three moves ahead, you will commandeer their thought process, and if you do that, you’ve taken their damn soul without them even realizing it. Our SEAL instructors were our bullies, and they didn’t realize the games I was playing during that week to keep Boat Crew Two sharp. And they didn’t have to. I imagined that they were obsessed with our exploits during Hell Week, but I don’t know that for sure. It was a ploy I used to maintain my mental edge and help our crew prevail. In the same way, if you are up against a competitor for a promotion, and you know where you fall short, you can shape up your game ahead of your interview or evaluation. In that scenario, laughing at your weaknesses won’t solve the problem. You must master them. In the meantime, if you are aware of your competitor’s vulnerabilities you can spin those to your advantage, but all of that takes research. Again, know the terrain, know yourself, and you’d better know your adversary in detail.

CHAPTER FIVE 5. ARMORED MIND

I looked over at Psycho. He held both thumbs up and sported a big goofy smile on his face like he was watching a damn comedy show. His split second of pleasure in my pain, reminded me of all the bullying and taunts I felt as a teenager, but instead of playing the victim and letting negative emotions sap my energy and force me to the surface, a failure, it was as if a new light blazed in my brain that allowed me to flip the script. Time stood still as I realized for the first time that I’d always looked at my entire life, everything I’d been through, from the wrong perspective. Yes, all the abuse I’d experienced and the negativity I had to push through challenged me to the core, but in that moment I stopped seeing myself as the victim of bad circumstance, and saw my life as the ultimate training ground instead. My disadvantages had been callousing my mind all along and had prepared me for that moment in that pool with Psycho Pete.

Hell Week is designed to show you that a human is capable of much more than you know. It opens your mind to the true possibilities of human potential, and with that comes a change in your mentality. You no longer fear cold water or doing push-ups all day. You realize that no matter what they do to you, they will never break you, so you don’t rush as much to make their arbitrary deadlines. You know if you don’t make it, the instructors will beat you down. Meaning push-ups, getting wet and sandy, anything to up the pain and discomfort quotient, but for those of us knuckle draggers still in the mix, our attitude was, So the fuck be it! None of us feared the instructors anymore, and we weren’t about to rush. They didn’t like that one damn bit. I had seen a lot of beat downs while at BUD/S, but the one we received that day will go down as one of the worst in history. We did push-ups until we couldn’t pick ourselves up off the deck, then they turned us on our backs and demanded flutter kicks. Each kick was torture for me. I kept putting my legs down because of the pain. I was showing weakness and if you show weakness, IT IS ON! Psycho and SBG descended and took turns on me. I went from push-ups to flutter kicks to bear crawls until they got tired. I could feel the moving parts of my knee shifting, floating, and grabbing every time I bent it to do those bear crawls, and it was agonizing. I moved slower than normal and knew I was broken. That simple question bubbled up again. Why? What was I trying to prove? Quitting seemed the sane choice. The comfort of mediocrity sounded like sweet relief until Psycho screamed in my ear. “Move faster, motherfucker!” Once again, an amazing feeling washed over me. I wasn’t focused on outdoing him this time. I was in the worst pain of my life, but my victory in the pool minutes before came rushing back. I’d finally proved to myself that I was a decent enough waterman to belong in the Navy SEALs. Heady stuff for a negatively buoyant kid that never took a swim lesson in his entire life. And the reason I got there was because I’d put in the work. The pool had been my kryptonite. Even though I was a far better swimmer as a SEAL candidate, I was still so stressed about water evolutions that I used to hit the pool after a day of training at least three times a week. I scaled the fifteen-foot fence just to gain after-hours access. Other than the academic aspect, nothing scared me as much about the prospects of BUD/S like the swimming drills, and by dedicating time I was able to callous over that fear and hit new levels underwater when the pressure was on. I thought about the incredible power of a calloused mind on task, as Psycho and SBG beat me down, and that thought became a feeling that took over my body and made me move as fast as a bear around that pool. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. The intense pain was gone, and so were those nagging questions. I was putting out harder than ever, breaking through the limitations of injury and pain tolerance, and riding a second wind delivered by a calloused mind. After the bear crawls, I went back to doing flutter kicks, and I still had no pain! As we were leaving the pool a half-hour later, SBG asked, “Goggins, what got into your ass to make you Superman?” I just smiled and left the pool. I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t yet understand what I now know.

Physical training is the perfect crucible to learn how to manage your thought process because when you’re working out, your focus is more likely to be single pointed, and your response to stress and pain is immediate and measurable. Do you hammer hard and snag that personal best like you said you would, or do you crumble? That decision rarely comes down to physical ability, it’s almost always a test of how well you are managing your own mind. If you push yourself through each split and use that energy to maintain a strong pace, you have a great chance of recording a faster time. Granted, some days it’s easier to do that than others. And the clock, or the score, doesn’t matter anyway. The reason it’s important to push hardest when you want to quit the most is because it helps you callous your mind. It’s the same reason why you have to do your best work when you are the least motivated. That’s why I loved PT in BUD/S and why I still love it today. Physical challenges strengthen my mind so I’m ready for whatever life throws at me, and it will do the same for you.

Most of us sweep our failures and evil secrets under the rug, but when we run into problems, that rug gets lifted up, and our darkness re-emerges, floods our soul, and influences the decisions which determine our character. My fears were never just about the water, and my anxieties toward Class 235 weren’t about the pain of First Phase. They were seeping from the infected wounds I’d been walking around with my entire life, and my denial of them amounted to a denial of myself. I was my own worst enemy! It wasn’t the world, or God, or the Devil that was out to get me. It was me! I was rejecting my past and therefore rejecting myself. My foundation, my character was defined by self-rejection. All my fears came from that deep-seated uneasiness I carried with being David Goggins because of what I’d gone through. Even after I’d reached a point where I no longer cared about what others thought of me, I still had trouble accepting me. Anyone who is of sound mind and body can sit down and think of twenty things in their life that could have gone differently. Where maybe they didn’t get a fair shake and where they took the path of least resistance. If you’re one of the few who acknowledge that, want to callous those wounds, and strengthen your character, its up to you to go back through your past and make peace with yourself by facing those incidents and all of your negative influences, and accepting them as weak spots in your own character. Only when you identify and accept your weaknesses will you finally stop running from your past. Then those incidents can be used more efficiently as fuel to become better and grow stronger. Right there on mom’s couch, as the moon burned its arc in the night sky, I faced down my demons. I faced myself. I couldn’t run from my dad anymore. I had to accept that he was part of me and that his lying, cheating character influenced me more than I cared to admit. Before that night, I used to tell people that my father had died rather than tell the truth about where I came from. Even in the SEALs I trotted out that lie. I knew why. When you get beat up, you don’t want to acknowledge getting your ass kicked. It doesn’t make you feel very manly, so the easiest thing to do is forget about it and move on. Pretend it never happened. Not anymore. Going forward it became very important for me to rehash my life, because when you examine your experiences with a fine-toothed comb and see where your issues come from, you can find strength in enduring pain and abuse. By accepting Trunnis Goggins as part of me, I was free to use where I came from as fuel. I realized that each episode of child abuse that could have killed me made me tough as hell and as sharp as a Samurai’s blade. True, I had been dealt a fucked-up hand, but that night I started thinking of it as running a 100-mile race with a fifty-pound ruck on my back. Could I still compete in that race even if everyone else was running free and easy, weighing 130 pounds? How fast would I be able to run once I’d shed that dead weight? I wasn’t even thinking about ultras yet. To me the race was life itself, and the more I took inventory, the more I realized how prepared I was for the fucked-up events yet to come. Life had put me in the fire, taken me out, and hammered me repeatedly, and diving back into the BUD/S cauldron, feeling a third Hell Week in a calendar year, would decorate me with a PhD in pain. I was about to become the sharpest sword ever made!

It’s time to visualize! Again, the average person thinks 2,000–3,000 thoughts per hour. Rather than focusing on bullshit you cannot change, imagine visualizing the things you can. Choose any obstacle in your way, or set a new goal, and visualize overcoming or achieving it. Before I engage in any challenging activity, I start by painting a picture of what my success looks and feels like. I’ll think about it every day and that feeling propels me forward when I’m training, competing, or taking on any task I choose. But visualization isn’t simply about daydreaming of some trophy ceremony—real or metaphorical. You must also visualize the challenges that are likely to arise and determine how you will attack those problems when they do. That way you can be as prepared as possible on the journey. When I show up for a foot race now, I drive the entire course first, visualizing success but also potential challenges, which helps me control my thought process. You can’t prepare for everything but if you engage in strategic visualization ahead of time, you’ll be as prepared as you possibly can be. That also means being prepared to answer the simple questions. Why are you doing this? What is driving you toward this achievement? Where does the darkness you’re using as fuel come from? What has calloused your mind? You’ll need to have those answers at your fingertips when you hit a wall of pain and doubt. To push through, you’ll need to channel your darkness, feed off it, and lean on your calloused mind. Remember, visualization will never compensate for work undone. You cannot visualize lies. All the strategies I employ to answer the simple questions and win the mind game are only effective because I put in work. It’s a lot more than mind over matter. It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day, but if you do, you’ll find that at the other end of that suffering is a whole other life just waiting for you.

CHAPTER SIX 6. IT’S NOT ABOUT A TROPHY

I don’t believe you’re gonna make the time at this pace,” she said, walking with me, encouraging me to drink more Myoplex. She didn’t cushion the blow. She was matter-of-fact about it. I stared over at her, mucus and Myoplex dripping down my chin, all the life drained from my eyes. For four hours, each agonizing step had demanded maximum focus and effort, but it wasn’t enough and unless I could find more, my philanthropic dream was dead. I choked and coughed. Took another sip. “Roger that,” I said softly. I knew that she was right. My pace continued to slow and was only getting worse. That’s when I finally realized that this fight wasn’t about Operation Red Wings or the families of the fallen. It was to a point, but none of that would help me run nineteen more miles before 10 a.m. No, this run, Badwater, my entire desire to push myself to the brink of destruction, was about me. It was about how much I was willing to suffer, how much more I could take, and how much I had to give. If I was gonna make it, this shit would have to get personal. I stared down at my legs. I could still see a trail of dried piss and blood stuck to my inner thigh and thought to myself, who in this entire fucked-up world would still be in this fight? Only you, Goggins! You haven’t trained, you don’t know dick about hydration and performance—all you know is you refuse to quit. Why? It’s funny, humans tend to hatch our most challenging goals and dreams, the ones that demand our greatest effort yet promise absolutely nothing, when we are tucked into our comfort zones. I was at work when Kostman laid out his challenge for me. I’d just had a warm shower. I was fed and watered. I was comfortable. And looking back, every single time I’ve been inspired to do something difficult, I was in a soft environment, because it all sounds doable when you’re chilling on your fucking couch, with a glass of lemonade or a chocolate shake in your hand. When we’re comfortable we can’t answer those simple questions that are bound to arise in the heat of battle because we don’t even realize they’re coming. But those answers are very important when you are no longer in your air-conditioned room or under your fluffy blanket. When your body is broken and beaten, when you’re confronted with agonizing pain and staring into the unknown, your mind will spin, and that’s when those questions become toxic. If you aren’t prepared in advance, if you allow your mind to remain undisciplined in an environment of intense suffering (it won’t feel like it, but it is very much a choice you are making), the only answer you are likely to find is the one that will make it stop as fast as possible. I don’t know. Hell Week changed everything for me. It allowed me to have the mindset to sign up for that twenty-four-hour race with less than a week’s notice because during Hell Week you live all the emotions of life, all the highs and lows, in six days. In 130 hours, you earn decades of wisdom. That’s why there was a schism between the twins after Marcus went through BUD/S. He’d gained the kind of self-knowledge that can only come from being broken down to nothing and finding more within. Morgan couldn’t speak that language until he endured it for himself. After surviving two Hell Weeks and participating in three, I was a native speaker. Hell Week was home. It was the fairest place I’ve ever been in this world. There were no timed evolutions. There was nothing graded, and there were no trophies. It was an all-out war of me against me, and that’s exactly where I found myself again when I was reduced to my absolute lowest on Hospitality Point. Why?! Why are you still doing this to yourself, Goggins?! “Because you are one hard motherfucker,” I screamed. The voices in my head were so penetrating, I had to bite back out loud. I was onto something. I felt an energy build immediately, as I realized that still being in the fight was a miracle in itself. Except it wasn’t a miracle. God didn’t come down and bless my ass. I did this! I kept going when I should have quit five hours ago. I am the reason I still have a chance. And I remembered something else too. This wasn’t the first time I’d taken on a seemingly impossible task. I picked up my pace. I was still walking, but I wasn’t sleepwalking anymore. I had life! I kept digging into my past, into my own imaginary Cookie Jar. I remembered as a kid, no matter how fucked up our life was, my mother always figured out a way to stock our damn cookie jar. She’d buy wafers and Oreos, Pepperidge Farm Milanos and Chips Ahoy!, and whenever she showed up with a new batch of cookies, she dumped them into one jar. With her permission we’d get to pick one or two out at a time. It was like a mini treasure hunt. I remember the joy of dropping my fist into that jar, wondering what I’d find, and before I crammed the cookie in my mouth I always took the time to admire it first, especially when we were broke in Brazil. I’d turn it around in my hand and say my own little prayer of thanks. The feeling of being that kid, locked in a moment of gratitude for a simple gift like a cookie, came back to me. I felt it viscerally, and I used that concept to stuff a new kind of Cookie Jar. Inside it were all my past victories. Like the time when I had to study three times as hard as anybody else during my senior year in high school just to graduate. That was a cookie. Or when I passed the ASVAB test as a senior and then again to get into BUD/S. Two more cookies. I remembered dropping over a hundred pounds in under three months, conquering my fear of water, graduating BUD/S at the top of my class, and being named Enlisted Honor Man in Army Ranger School (more on that soon). All those were cookies loaded with chocolate chunks. These weren’t mere flashbacks. I wasn’t just floating through my memory files, I actually tapped into the emotional state I felt during those victories, and in so doing accessed my sympathetic nervous system once again. My adrenaline took over, the pain started to fade just enough, and my pace picked up. I began swinging my arms and lengthening my stride. My fractured feet were still a bloody mess, full of blisters, the toenails peeling off almost every toe, but I kept pounding, and soon it was me who was slaloming runners with pained expressions as I raced the clock. From then on, the Cookie Jar became a concept I’ve employed whenever I need a reminder of who I am and what I’m capable of. We all have a cookie jar inside us, because life, being what it is, has always tested us. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success. It doesn’t have to be a big victory either. It can be something small. I know we all want the whole victory today, but when I was teaching myself to read I would be happy when I could understand every word in a single paragraph. I knew I still had a long way to go to move from a third-grade reading level to that of a senior in high school, but even a small win like that was enough to keep me interested in learning and finding more within myself. You don’t drop one hundred pounds in less than three months without losing five pounds in a week first. Those first five pounds I lost were a small accomplishment, and it doesn’t sound like a lot, but at the time it was proof that I could lose weight and that my goal, however improbable, was not impossible! The engine in a rocket ship does not fire without a small spark first. We all need small sparks, small accomplishments in our lives to fuel the big ones. Think of your small accomplishments as kindling. When you want a bonfire, you don’t start by lighting a big log. You collect some witch’s hair—a small pile of hay or some dry, dead grass. You light that, and then add small sticks and bigger sticks before you feed your tree stump into the blaze. Because it’s the small sparks, which start small fires, that eventually build enough heat to burn the whole fucking forest down. If you don’t have any big accomplishments to draw on yet, so be it. Your small victories are your cookies to savor, and make sure you do savor them. Yeah, I was hard on myself when I looked in the Accountability Mirror, but I also praised myself whenever I could claim a small victory, because we all need that, and very few of us take the time to celebrate our successes. Sure, in the moment, we might enjoy them, but do we ever look back on them and feel that win again and again? Maybe that sounds narcissistic to you. But I’m not talking about bullshitting about the glory days here. I’m not suggesting you crawl up your own ass and bore your friends with all your stories about what a badass you used to be. Nobody wants to hear that shit. I’m talking about utilizing past successes to fuel you to new and bigger ones. Because in the heat of battle, when shit gets real, we need to draw inspiration to push through our own exhaustion, depression, pain, and misery. We need to spark a bunch of small fires to become the motherfucking inferno. But digging into the Cookie Jar when things are going south takes focus and determination because at first the brain doesn’t want to go there. It wants to remind you that you’re suffering and that your goal is impossible. It wants to stop you so it can stop the pain. That night in San Diego was the most difficult night of my life, physically. I’d never felt so broken, and there were no souls to take. I wasn’t competing for a trophy. There was no one standing in my way. All I had to draw on to keep myself going was me. The Cookie Jar became my energy bank. Whenever the pain got to be too much, I dug into it and took a bite. The pain was never gone, but I only felt it in waves because my brain was otherwise occupied, which allowed me to drown out the simple questions and shrink time. Each lap became a victory lap, celebrating a different cookie, another small fire. Mile eighty-one became eighty-two, and an hour and a half later, I was in the nineties. I’d run ninety fucking miles with no training! Who does that shit? An hour later I was at ninety-five, and after nearly nineteen hours of running almost non-stop, I’d done it! I’d hit one hundred miles! Or had I? I couldn’t remember, so I ran one more lap just to make sure. After running 101 miles, my race finally over, I staggered to my lawn chair and Kate placed a camouflaged poncho liner over my body as I shivered in the fog. Steam poured off me. My vision was blurred. I remember feeling something warm on my leg, looked down and saw I was pissing blood again. I knew what was coming next, but the port-a-potties were about forty feet away, which may as well have been forty miles, or 4,000. I tried to get up but I was way too dizzy and collapsed back into that chair, an immovable object ready to accept the inevitable truth that I was about to shit myself. It was much worse this time. My entire backside and lower back were smeared with warm feces. Kate knew what an emergency looked like. She sprinted to our Toyota Camry and backed the car up on the grassy knoll beside me. My legs were stiff as fossils frozen in stone, and I leaned on her to slide into the backseat. She was frantic behind the wheel and wanted to take me directly to the ER, but I wanted to go home. We lived on the second deck of an apartment complex in Chula Vista, and I leaned on her back with my arms around her neck as she led me up that staircase. She balanced me up against the stucco as she opened the door to our apartment. I took a few steps inside before blacking out. I came to, on the kitchen floor, a few minutes later. My back was still smeared with shit, my thighs caked in blood and urine. My feet were blistered up and bleeding in twelve places. Seven of my ten toenails were dangling loose, connected only by tabs of dead skin. We had a combination tub and shower and she got the shower going before helping me crawl toward the bathroom and climb into the tub. I remember lying there, naked, with the shower pouring down upon me. I shivered, felt and looked like death, and then I started peeing again. But instead of blood or urine, what came out of me looked like thick brown bile. Petrified, Kate stepped into the hall to dial my mom. She’d been to the race with a friend of hers who happened to be a doctor. When he heard my symptoms, the doctor suggested that I might be in kidney failure and that I needed to go to the ER immediately. Kate hung up, stormed into the bathroom, and found me lying on my left side, in the fetal position. “We need to get you to the ER now, David!” She kept talking, shouting, crying, trying to reach me through the haze, and I heard most of what she said, but I knew if we went to the hospital they’d give me pain killers and I didn’t want to mask this pain. I’d just accomplished the most amazing feat in my entire life. It was harder than Hell Week, more significant to me than becoming a SEAL, and more challenging than my deployment to Iraq because this time I had done something I’m not sure anyone had ever done before. I ran 101 miles with zero preparation. I knew then that I’d been selling myself short. That there was a whole new level of performance out there to tap into. That the human body can withstand and accomplish a hell of a lot more than most of us think possible, and that it all begins and ends in the mind. This wasn’t a theory. It wasn’t something I’d read in a damn book. I’d experienced it first hand on Hospitality Point. This last part. This pain and suffering. This was my trophy ceremony. I’d earned this. This was confirmation that I’d mastered my own mind—at least for a little while—and that what I’d just accomplished was something special. As I lay there, curled up in the tub, shivering in the fetal position, relishing the pain, I thought of something else too. If I could run 101 miles with zero training, imagine what I could do with a little preparation.

CHALLENGE #6 Take inventory of your Cookie Jar. Crack your journal open again. Write it all out. Remember, this is not some breezy stroll through your personal trophy room. Don’t just write down your achievement hit list. Include life obstacles you’ve overcome as well, like quitting smoking or overcoming depression or a stutter. Add in those minor tasks you failed earlier in life, but tried again a second or third time and ultimately succeeded at. Feel what it was like to overcome those struggles, those opponents, and win. Then get to work. Set ambitious goals before each workout and let those past victories carry you to new personal bests. If it’s a run or bike ride, include some time to do interval work and challenge yourself to beat your best mile split. Or simply maintain a maximum heart rate for a full minute, then two minutes. If you’re at home, focus on pull-ups or push-ups. Do as many as possible in two minutes. Then try to beat your best. When the pain hits and tries to stop you short of your goal, dunk your fist in, pull out a cookie, and let it fuel you! If you’re more focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before, or read a record number of books in a given month. Your Cookie Jar can help there too. Because if you perform this challenge correctly and truly challenge yourself, you’ll come to a point in any exercise where pain, boredom, or self-doubt kicks in, and you’ll need to push back to get through it. The Cookie Jar is your shortcut to taking control of your own thought process. Use it that way! The point here isn’t to make yourself feel like a hero for the fuck of it. It’s not a hooray-for-me session. It’s to remember what a badass you are so you can use that energy to succeed again in the heat of battle!

CHAPTER SEVEN 7. THE MOST POWERFUL WEAPON

Based on a link he sent along with his reply, I found one more ultra race scheduled before the Badwater application was due. It was called the Hurt 100, and the name did not lie. One of the toughest 100-mile trail races in the world, it was set in a triple canopy rainforest on the island of Oahu. To cross the finish line, I’d have to run up and down 24,500 vertical feet. That’s some Himalayan shit. I stared at the race profile. It was all sharp spikes and deep dives. It looked like an arrhythmic EKG. I couldn’t do this race cold. There’s no way I could finish it without at least some training, but by early December I was still in so much agony that walking up the stairs to my apartment was pure torture. The following weekend I zoomed up Interstate 15 to Vegas for the Las Vegas Marathon. It wasn’t spur of the moment. Months before I’d ever heard the words “San Diego One Day,” Kate, my mom, and I had circled December 5th on our calendars. It was 2005, the first year that the Las Vegas Marathon started on the Strip, and we wanted to be part of that shit. Except I never trained for it, then the San Diego One Day happened, and by the time we got to Vegas I had no illusions about my fitness level. I tried to run the morning before we left, but I still had stress fractures in my feet, my medial tendons were wobbly, and even while wrapped with a special bandage I’d found that could stabilize my ankles, I couldn’t last longer than a quarter mile. So I didn’t plan on running as we rocked up to the Mandalay Bay Casino & Resort on race day. It was a beautiful morning. Music was pumping, there were thousands of smiling faces in the street, the clean desert air had a chill to it, and the sun was shining. Running conditions don’t get much better, and Kate was ready to go. Her goal was to break five hours, and for once, I was satisfied being a cheerleader. My mom had always planned on walking it, and I figured I’d stroll with her for as long as I could, then hail a cab to the finish line and cheer my ladies to the tape. The three of us toed up with the masses as the clock struck 7 a.m., and someone got on the mic to begin the official count down. “Ten…nine…eight…” When he hit one, a horn sounded, and like Pavlov’s dog something clicked inside me. I still don’t know what it was. Perhaps I underestimated my competitive spirit. Maybe it was because I knew Navy SEALs were supposed to be the hardest motherfuckers in the world. We were supposed to run on broken legs and fractured feet. Or so went the legend I’d bought into long ago. Whatever it was, something triggered and the last thing I remember seeing as the horn echoed down the street was shock and real concern on the faces of Kate and my mother as I charged down the boulevard and out of sight. The pain was serious for the first quarter mile, but after that adrenaline took over. I hit the first mile marker at 7:10 and kept running like the asphalt was melting behind me. Ten kilometers into the race, my time was around forty-three minutes. That’s solid, but I wasn’t focused on the clock because considering how I’d felt the day before, I was still in total disbelief that I’d actually run 6.2 miles! My body was broken. How was this happening? Most people in my condition would have both feet in soft casts, and here I was running a marathon! I got to mile thirteen, the halfway point, and saw the official clock. It read, “1:35:55.” I did the math and realized that I was in the hunt to qualify for the Boston marathon, but was right on the cusp. In order to qualify in my age group, I had to finish in under 3:10:59. I laughed in disbelief and slammed a paper cup of Gatorade. In less than two hours the game had flipped, and I might never get this chance again. I’d seen so much death by then—in my personal life and on the battlefield—that I knew tomorrow was not guaranteed. Before me was an opportunity, and if you give me an opportunity, I will break that motherfucker off! It wasn’t easy. I’d surfed an adrenaline wave for the first thirteen miles, but I felt every inch of the second half, and at mile eighteen, I hit a wall. That’s a common theme in marathon running, because mile eighteen is usually when a runner’s glycogen levels run low, and I was bonking, my lungs heaving. My legs felt like I was running in deep Saharan sand. I needed to stop and take a break, but I refused, and two hard miles later I felt rejuvenated. I reached the next clock at mile twenty-two. I was still in the hunt for Boston, though I’d fallen thirty seconds off the pace, and to qualify, the final four miles would have to be my very best. I dug deep, kicked my thighs up high, and lengthened my stride. I was a man possessed as I turned the final corner and charged toward the finish line at the Mandalay Bay. Thousands of people had assembled on the sidewalk, cheering. It was all a beautiful blur to me as I sprinted home. I ran my last two miles at a sub-seven-minute pace, finished the race in just over 3:08, and qualified for Boston. Somewhere on the streets of Las Vegas, my wife and mother would deal with their own struggles and overcome them to finish too, and as I sat on a patch of grass, waiting for them, I contemplated another simple question I couldn’t shake. It was a new one, and wasn’t fear-based, pain-spiked, or self-limiting. This one felt open. What am I capable of? SEAL training had pushed me to the brink several times, but whenever it beat me down I popped up to take another pounding. That experience made me hard, but it also left me wanting more of the same, and day-to-day Navy SEAL life just wasn’t like that. Then came the San Diego One Day, and now this. I’d finished a marathon at an elite pace (for a weekend warrior) when I had no business even walking a mile. Both were incredible physical feats that didn’t seem possible. But they’d happened. What am I capable of? I couldn’t answer that question, but as I looked around the finish line that day and considered what I’d accomplished, it became clear that we are all leaving a lot of money on the table without realizing it. We habitually settle for less than our best; at work, in school, in our relationships, and on the playing field or race course. We settle as individuals, and we teach our children to settle for less than their best, and all of that ripples out, merges, and multiplies within our communities and society as a whole. We’re not talking some bad weekend in Vegas, no more cash at the ATM kind of loss either. In that moment, the cost of missing out on so much excellence in this eternally fucked-up world felt incalculable to me, and it still does. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

It wasn’t easy to begin the fourth lap of the Hurt 100 because I knew how much it would hurt, and when you are feeling dead and buried, dehydrated, wrung out, and torn the fuck up at 40 percent, finding that extra 60 percent feels impossible. I didn’t want my suffering to continue. Nobody does! That’s why the line “fatigue makes cowards of us all” is true as shit. Mind you, I didn’t know anything about The 40% Rule that day. The Hurt 100 is when I first started to contemplate it, but I had hit the wall many times before, and I had learned to stay present and open minded enough to recalibrate my goals even at my lowest. I knew that staying in the fight is always the hardest, and most rewarding, first step. Of course, it’s easy to be open minded when you leave yoga class and are taking a stroll by the beach, but when you’re suffering, keeping an open mind is hard work. The same is true if you are facing a daunting challenge on the job or at school. Maybe you are tackling a hundred-question test and know that you’ve bricked the first fifty. At that point, it’s extremely difficult to maintain the necessary discipline to force yourself to keep taking the test seriously. It’s also imperative that you find it because in every failure there is something to be gained, even if it’s only practice for the next test you’ll have to take. Because that next test is coming. That’s a guarantee. I didn’t start my fourth lap with any sort of conviction. I was in wait-and-see mode, and halfway up that first climb I became so dizzy I had to sit under a tree for a while. Two runners passed me, one at a time. They checked in but I waved them on. Told them I was just fine. Yeah, I was doing great. I was a regular Akos Konya. From my vantage point I could see the crest of the hill above and encouraged myself to walk at least that far. If I still wanted to quit after that, I told myself that I would be willing to sign off, and that there is no shame in not finishing the Hurt 100. I said that to myself again and again because that’s how our governor works. It massages your ego even as it stops you short of your goals. But once I got to the top of the climb, the higher ground gave me a new perspective and I saw another place off in the distance and decided to cover that small stretch of mud, rock, and root too—you know, before quitting for good. Once I got there I was staring down a long descent and even though the footing was troubling, it still looked much easier than going uphill. Without realizing it, I’d gotten to a point where I was able to strategize. On the first climb, I was so dizzy and weak I was swept into a moment of fuck, which clogged my brain. There was no room for strategy. I just wanted to quit, but by moving a little bit further I’d reset my brain. I’d calmed down and realized I could chunk the race down to size, and staying in the game like that gave me hope, and hope is addictive.

Prepare yourself! We know life can be hard, and yet we feel sorry for ourselves when it isn’t fair. From this point forward, accept the following as Goggins’ laws of nature: You will be made fun of. You will feel insecure. You may not be the best all the time. You may be the only black, white, Asian, Latino, female, male, gay, lesbian or [fill in your identity here] in a given situation. There will be times when you feel alone. Get over it! Our minds are fucking strong, they are our most powerful weapon, but we have stopped using them. We have access to so many more resources today than ever before and yet we are so much less capable than those who came before us. If you want to be one of the few to defy those trends in our ever-softening society, you will have to be willing to go to war with yourself and create a whole new identity, which requires an open mind. It’s funny, being open minded is often tagged as new age or soft. Fuck that. Being open minded enough to find a way is old school. It’s what knuckle draggers do. And that’s exactly what I did.

During all the lonely hours of heat training, I’d started to dissect the quitting mind and realized that if I was going to perform close to my absolute potential and make the Warrior Foundation proud, I’d have to do more than answer the simple questions as they came up. I’d have to stifle the quitting mind before it gained any traction at all. Before I ever asked myself, “Why?” I’d need my Cookie Jar on recall to convince me that despite what my body was saying, I was immune to suffering. Because nobody quits an ultra race or Hell Week in a split second. People make the decision to quit hours before they ring that bell, so I needed to be present enough to recognize when my body and mind were starting to fail in order to short circuit the impulse to look for a way out long before I tumbled into that fatal funnel. Ignoring pain or blocking out the truth like I did at the San Diego One Day would not work this time, and if you are on the hunt for your 100 percent you should catalog your weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Don’t ignore them. Be prepared for them, because in any endurance event, in any high-stress environment, your weaknesses will surface like bad karma, build in volume, and overwhelm you. Unless you get ahead of them first.

Not long after, Akos put some space between us, and at mile twenty-six, I started to realize that, once again, I went out way too fast. I was dizzy and lightheaded, and I was dealing with GI issues. Translation: I had to shit on the side of the road. All of which stemmed from the fact that I was severely dehydrated. My mind spun with dire prognosis after dire prognosis. Excuses to quit piled up one after another. I didn’t listen. I responded by taking care of my dehydration issue and pounding more water than I wanted.

First, a quick reminder of how this process works. In 1999, when I weighed 297 pounds, my first run was a quarter mile. Fast forward to 2007, I ran 205 miles in thirty-nine hours, nonstop. I didn’t get there overnight, and I don’t expect you to either. Your job is to push past your normal stopping point. Whether you are running on a treadmill or doing a set of push-ups, get to the point where you are so tired and in pain that your mind is begging you to stop. Then push just 5 to 10 percent further. If the most push-ups you have ever done is one hundred in a workout, do 105 or 110. If you normally run thirty miles each week, run 10 percent more next week.

CHAPTER EIGHT 8. TALENT NOT REQUIRED

Over the next three days I would swim 6.2 miles, ride 261 miles, and run a double marathon, covering the entire perimeter of the Big Island of Hawaii. Once again, I was raising money for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, and because I’d been written up and interviewed on camera after Badwater, I was invited by a multi-millionaire I’d never met to stay in his absurd palace on the sand in the run-up to the Ultraman World Championships in November 2006. It was a generous gesture, but I was so focused on becoming the very best version of myself his glitz didn’t impress me. In my mind, I still hadn’t achieved shit. If anything, staying in his house only inflated the chip on my shoulder. He would never have invited my wanna-be-thug ass to come chill with him in Kona luxury back in the day. He only reached out because I’d become somebody a rich guy like him wanted to know. Still, I appreciated being able to show my mom a better life, and whenever I was offered a taste, I invited her to experience it with me. She’d swallowed more pain than anyone I’d ever known, and I wanted to remind her that we’d climbed out of that gutter, while I kept my own gaze locked at sewer level. We didn’t live in that $7 a month place in Brazil anymore, but I was still paying rent on that motherfucker, and will be for the rest of my life. The race launched from the beach beside the pier in downtown Kona—the same start line as the Ironman World Championships, but there wasn’t much of a crowd for our race. There were only thirty athletes in the entire field compared to over 1,200 in the Ironman! It was such a small group I could look every one of my competitors in the eye and size them up, which is how I noticed the hardest man on the beach. I never did catch his name, but I’ll always remember him because he was in a wheelchair. Talk about heart. That man had a presence beyond his stature. He was fucking immense! Ever since I’d started up in BUD/S, I’d been in search of people like that. Men and women with an uncommon way of thinking. One thing that surprised me about military special operations was that some of the guys lived so mainstream. They weren’t trying to push themselves every day of their lives, and I wanted to be around people who thought and trained uncommon 24/7, not just when duty called. That man had every excuse in the world to be at home, but he was ready to do one of the hardest stage races in the world, something 99.9 percent of the public wouldn’t even consider, and with just his two arms! To me, he was what ultra racing was all about, and its why after Badwater I’d become hooked on this world. Talent wasn’t required for this sport. It was all about heart and hard work, and it delivered relentless challenge after relentless challenge, always demanding more.

Our culture has become hooked on the quick-fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up. My work ethic is the single most important factor in all of my accomplishments. Everything else is secondary, and when it comes to hard work, whether in the gym or on the job, The 40% Rule applies. To me, a forty-hour work week is a 40 percent effort. It may be satisfactory, but that’s another word for mediocrity. Don’t settle for a forty-hour work week. There are 168 hours in a week! That means you have the hours to put in that extra time at work without skimping on your exercise. It means streamlining your nutrition, spending quality time with your wife and kids. It means scheduling your life like you’re on a twenty-four-hour mission every single day. The number one excuse I hear from people as to why they don’t work out as much as they want to is that they don’t have time. Look, we all have work obligations, none of us want to lose sleep, and you’ll need time with the family or they’ll trip the fuck out. I get it, and if that’s your situation, you must win the morning. When I was full-time with the SEALs I maximized the dark hours before dawn. When my wife was sleeping, I would bang out a six- to ten-mile run. My gear was all laid out the night before, my lunch was packed, and my work clothes were in my locker at work where I’d shower before my day started at 7:30 a.m. On a typical day, I’d be out the door for my run just after 4 a.m. and back by 5:15 a.m. Since that wasn’t enough for me, and because we only owned one car, I rode my bike (I finally got my own shit!) twenty-five miles to work. I’d work from 7:30 a.m. to noon, and eat at my desk before or after my lunch break. During the lunch hour I’d hit the gym or do a four- to six-mile beach run, work the afternoon shift and hop on my bike for the twenty-five-mile ride home. By the time I was home at 7 p.m., I’d have run about fifteen miles, rocked fifty miles on the bike, and put in a full day at the office. I was always home for dinner and in bed by 10 p.m. so I could do it all over again the next day. On Saturdays I’d sleep in until 7 a.m., hit a three-hour workout, and spend the rest of the weekend with Kate. If I didn’t have a race, Sundays were my active recovery days. I’d do an easy ride at a low heart rate, keeping my pulse below 110 beats per minute to stimulate healthy blood flow. Maybe you think I’m a special case or an obsessive maniac. Fine, I won’t argue with you. But what about my friend Mike? He’s a big-time financial advisor in New York City. His job is high pressure and his work day is a hell of a lot longer than eight hours. He has a wife and two kids, and he’s an ultra runner. Here’s how he does it. He wakes up at 4 a.m. every weekday, runs sixty to ninety minutes each morning while his family is still snoozing, rides a bike to work and back and does a quick thirty-minute treadmill run after he gets home. He goes out for longer runs on weekends, but he minimizes its impact on his family obligations. He’s high-powered, wealthy as fuck, and could easily maintain his status quo with less effort and enjoy the sweet fruits of his labors, but he finds a way to stay hard because his labors are his sweetest fruits. And he makes time to get it all in by minimizing the amount of bullshit clogging his schedule. His priorities are clear, and he remains dedicated to his priorities. I’m not talking about general priorities here either. Each hour of his week is dedicated to a particular task and when that hour shows up in real time, he focuses 100 percent on that task. That’s how I do it too, because that is the only way to minimize wasted hours. Evaluate your life in its totality! We all waste so much time doing meaningless bullshit. We burn hours on social media and watching television, which by the end of the year would add up to entire days and weeks if you tabulated time like you do your taxes. You should, because if you knew the truth you’d deactivate your Facebook account STAT, and cut your cable. When you find yourself having frivolous conversations or becoming ensnared in activities that don’t better you in any way, move the fuck on! For years I’ve lived like a monk. I don’t see or spend time with a lot of people. My circle is very tight. I post on social media once or twice a week and I never check anybody else’s feeds because I don’t follow anyone. That’s just me. I’m not saying you need to be that unforgiving, because you and I probably don’t share the same goals. But I know you have goals too, and room for improvement, or you wouldn’t be reading my book, and I guarantee that if you audited your schedule you’d find time for more work and less bullshit. It’s up to you to find ways to eviscerate your bullshit. How much time do you spend at the dinner table talking about nothing after the meal is done? How many calls and texts do you send for no reason at all? Look at your whole life, list your obligations and tasks. Put a time stamp on them. How many hours are required to shop, eat, and clean? How much sleep do you need? What’s your commute like? Can you make it there under your own power? Block everything into windows of time, and once your day is scheduled out, you’ll know how much flexibility you have to exercise on a given day and how to maximize it. Perhaps you aren’t looking to get fit, but have been dreaming of starting a business of your own, or have always wanted to learn a language or an instrument you’re obsessed with. Fine, the same rule applies. Analyze your schedule, kill your empty habits, burn out the bullshit, and see what’s left. Is it one hour per day? Three? Now maximize that shit. That means listing your prioritized tasks every hour of the day. You can even narrow it down to fifteen-minute windows, and don’t forget to include backstops in your day-to-day schedule. Remember how I forgot to include backstops in my race plan at Ultraman? You need backstops in your day-to-day schedule too. If one task bleeds into overtime, make sure you know it, and begin to transition into your next prioritized task straight away. Use your smartphone for productivity hacks, not click bait. Turn on your calendar alerts. Have those alarms set. If you audit your life, skip the bullshit, and use backstops, you’ll find time to do everything you need and want to do. But remember that you also need rest, so schedule that in. Listen to your body, sneak in those ten- to twenty-minute power naps when necessary, and take one full rest day per week. If it’s a rest day, truly allow your mind and body to relax. Turn your phone off. Keep the computer shut down. A rest day means you should be relaxed, hanging with friends or family, and eating and drinking well, so you can recharge and get back at it. It’s not a day to lose yourself in technology or stay hunched at your desk in the form of a damn question mark. The whole point of the twenty-four-hour mission is to keep up a championship pace, not for a season or a year, but for your entire life! That requires quality rest and recovery time. Because there is no finish line. There is always more to learn, and you will always have weaknesses to strengthen if you want to become as hard as woodpecker lips. Hard enough to hammer countless miles, and finish that shit strong!

CHAPTER NINE 9. UNCOMMON AMONGST UNCOMMON

Starting at zero is a mindset that says my refrigerator is never full, and it never will be. We can always become stronger and more agile, mentally and physically. We can always become more capable and more reliable. Since that’s the case we should never feel that our work is done. There is always more to do. Are you an experienced scuba diver? Great, shed your gear, take a deep breath and become a one-hundred-foot free diver. Are you a badass triathlete? Cool, learn how to rock climb. Are you enjoying a wildly successful career? Wonderful, learn a new language or skill. Get a second degree. Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb fuck in the classroom again, because that is the only way to expand your body of knowledge and body of work. It’s the only way to expand your mind. During week two of my second platoon, my Chief and OIC showed their cards. It was devastating to hear that they didn’t feel that we needed to earn our status every day. Sure, all the guys I worked with over the years were relatively hard guys and highly skilled. They enjoyed the challenges of the job, the brotherhood, and being treated like superstars. They all loved being SEALs, but some weren’t interested in starting at zero because just by qualifying to breathe rare air they were already satisfied. Now, that is a very common way of thinking. Most people in the world, if they ever push themselves at all, are willing to push themselves only so far. Once they reach a cushy plateau, they chill the fuck out and enjoy their rewards, but there’s another phrase for that mentality. It’s called getting soft, and that I could not abide. As far as I was concerned I had my own reputation to uphold, and when the rest of the platoon opted out of my custom made hellscape, the chip on my shoulder grew even bigger. I ramped up my workouts and vowed to put out so hard it would hurt their fucking feelings. As head of PT, that was not in my job description. I was supposed to inspire guys to give more. Instead, I saw what I considered a glaring weakness and let them know I wasn’t impressed. In one short week, my leadership regressed light years from where I was in Ranger School. I lost touch with my situational awareness (SA) and didn’t respect the men in my platoon enough. As a leader, I was trying to bull my way through, and they bucked against that. Nobody gave an inch, including the officers. I suppose all of us took a path of least resistance. I just didn’t notice it because physically I was going harder than ever. And I had one guy with me. Sledge was a hard motherfucker who grew up in San Bernardino, the son of a firefighter and a secretary, and, like me, he taught himself to swim in order to pass the swim test and qualify for BUD/S. He was only a year older but was already in his fourth platoon. He was also a heavy drinker, a little overweight, and looking to change his life. The morning after the Chief, the OIC, and I had words, Sledge showed up at 5 a.m. ready to roll. I’d been there since 4:30 a.m. and had a lather of sweat working already. “I like what you’re doing with the workouts,” he said, “and I wanna keep doing them.” “Roger that.” From then on, no matter where we were stationed, whether that was Coronado, Niland, or Iraq, we got after it every single morning. We’d meet up at 4 a.m. and get to it. Sometimes that meant running up the side of a mountain before hitting the O-Course at high speed and carrying logs up and over the berm and down the beach. In BUD/S, usually six men carried those logs. We did it with just the two of us. On another day we rocked a pull-up pyramid, hitting sets of one, all the way up to twenty, and back down to one again. After every other set we’d climb a rope forty feet high. One thousand pull-ups before breakfast became our new mantra. At first, Sledge struggled to rock one set of ten pull-ups. Within months he’d lost thirty-five pounds and was hitting one hundred sets of ten! In Iraq, it was impossible to get long runs in, so we lived in the weight room. We did hundreds of deadlifts and spent hours on the hip sled. We went way beyond overtraining. We didn’t care about muscle fatigue or breakdown because after a certain point we were training our minds, not our bodies. My workouts weren’t designed to make us fast runners or to be the strongest men on the mission. I was training us to take torture so we’d remain relaxed in extraordinarily uncomfortable environments. And shit did get uncomfortable from time to time. Despite the clear divide within our platoon (Sledge and me vs. everyone else) we operated well together in Iraq. Off duty, however, there was a huge gulf between who the two of us were becoming and who I thought the men in my platoon were, and my disappointment showed. I wore my shitty attitude around like a shroud, thus earning me the platoon nickname David “Leave Me Alone” Goggins, and never woke up to realize that my disappointment was my own problem. Not my teammates’ fault.

CHALLENGE #9 This one’s for the unusual motherfuckers in this world. A lot of people think that once they reach a certain level of status, respect, or success, that they’ve made it in life. I’m here to tell you that you always have to find more. Greatness is not something that if you meet it once it stays with you forever. That shit evaporates like a flash of oil in a hot pan. If you truly want to become uncommon amongst the uncommon, it will require sustaining greatness for a long period of time. It requires staying in constant pursuit and putting out unending effort. This may sound appealing but will require everything you have to give and then some. Believe me, this is not for everyone because it will demand singular focus and may upset the balance in your life. That’s what it takes to become a true overachiever, and if you are already surrounded by people who are at the top of their game, what are you going to do differently to stand out? It’s easy to stand out amongst everyday people and be a big fish in a small pond. It is a much more difficult task when you are a wolf surrounded by wolves. This means not only getting into Wharton Business School, but being ranked #1 in your class. It means not just graduating BUD/S, but becoming Enlisted Honor Man in Army Ranger School then going out and finishing Badwater. Torch the complacency you feel gathering around you, your coworkers, and teammates in that rare air. Continue to put obstacles in front of yourself, because that’s where you’ll find the friction that will help you grow even stronger. Before you know it, you will stand alone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN 11. WHAT IF?

The Buddha famously said that life is suffering. I’m not a Buddhist, but I know what he meant and so do you. To exist in this world, we must contend with humiliation, broken dreams, sadness, and loss. That’s just nature. Each specific life comes with its own personalized portion of pain. It’s coming for you. You can’t stop it. And you know it. In response, most of us are programmed to seek comfort as a way to numb it all out and cushion the blows. We carve out safe spaces. We consume media that confirms our beliefs, we take up hobbies aligned with our talents, we try to spend as little time as possible doing the tasks we fucking loathe, and that makes us soft. We live a life defined by the limits we imagine and desire for ourselves because it’s comfortable as hell in that box. Not just for us, but for our closest family and friends. The limits we create and accept become the lens through which they see us. Through which they love and appreciate us. But for some, those limits start to feel like bondage, and when we least expect it, our imagination jumps those walls and hunts down dreams that in the immediate aftermath feel attainable. Because most dreams are. We are inspired to make changes little by little, and it hurts. Breaking the shackles and stretching beyond our own perceived limits takes hard fucking work—oftentimes physical work—and when you put yourself on the line, self doubt and pain will greet you with a stinging combination that will buckle your knees. Most people who are merely inspired or motivated will quit at that point, and upon their return, their cells will feel that much smaller, their shackles even tighter. The few who remain outside their walls will encounter even more pain and much more doubt, courtesy of those who we thought were our biggest fans. When it was time for me to lose 106 pounds in less than three months, everyone I talked to told me there was no way I could do it. “Don’t expect too much,” they all said. Their weak-ass dialogue only fed my own self doubt. But it’s not the external voice that will break you down. It’s what you tell yourself that matters. The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself. You wake up with them, you walk around with them, you go to bed with them, and eventually you act on them. Whether they be good or bad. We are all our own worst haters and doubters because self doubt is a natural reaction to any bold attempt to change your life for the better. You can’t stop it from blooming in your brain, but you can neutralize it, and all the other external chatter by asking, What if? What if is an exquisite fuck-you to anyone who has ever doubted your greatness or stood in your way. It silences negativity. It’s a reminder that you don’t really know what you’re capable of until you put everything you’ve got on the line. It makes the impossible feel at least a little more possible. What if is the power and permission to face down your darkest demons, your very worst memories, and accept them as part of your history. If and when you do that, you will be able to use them as fuel to envision the most audacious, outrageous achievement and go get it. We live in a world with a lot of insecure, jealous people. Some of them are our best friends. They are blood relatives. Failure terrifies them. So does our success. Because when we transcend what we once thought possible, push our limits, and become more, our light reflects off all the walls they’ve built up around them. Your light enables them to see the contours of their own prison, their own self-limitations. But if they are truly the great people you always believed them to be, their jealousy will evolve, and soon their imagination might hop its fence, and it will be their turn to change for the better. I hope that’s what this book has done for you. I hope that right now you are nose-to-concrete with your own bullshit limits you didn’t even know were there. I hope you’re willing to do the work to break them down. I hope you’re willing to change. You’ll feel pain, but if you accept it, endure it, and callous your mind, you’ll reach a point where not even pain can hurt you. There is a catch, however. When you live this way, there is no end to it.

Note Is the pursuit of pain just a reflection of the emptiness we find in a society where all of our actual needs are catered for?

Whatever failures and accomplishments pile up in the years to come, and there will be plenty of both I’m sure, I know I’ll continue to give it my all and set goals that seem impossible to most. And when those motherfuckers say so, I’ll look them dead in the eye and respond with one simple question. What if?