Can't Hurt Me ← We Can Solve This

What are the current factors limiting your growth and success? Is someone standing in your way at work or school? Are you underappreciated and overlooked for opportunities? What are the long odds you’re up against right now? Are you standing in your own way? Break out your journal—if

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.

dreams, and goals on Post-Its and tag up your mirror. If you need more education, remind yourself that you need to start working your ass off because you aren’t smart enough!

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.

For me, the only way to make it through that was to feed off my depression. I had to flip it and convince myself that all that self-doubt and anxiety was confirmation that I was no longer living an aimless life. My task may turn out to be impossible but at least I was back on a motherfucking mission.

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.

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.

The first step on the journey toward a calloused mind is stepping outside your comfort zone on a regular basis.

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.

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 it’s a difficult physical challenge you will probably have to defeat your own demons before you can take your opponent’s soul. That means rehearsing answers to the simple question that is sure to rise up like a thought bubble: “Why am I here?” If you know that moment is coming and have your answer ready, you will be equipped to make the split second-decision to ignore your weakened mind and keep moving. Know why you’re in the fight to stay in the fight!

never forget that all emotional and physical anguish is finite! It all ends eventually. Smile at pain and watch it fade for at least a second or two.

Once, I was so focused on failing, I was afraid to even try. Now I would take on any challenge.

That may mean acing an exam, or crafting an ideal proposal, or smashing a sales goal. Whatever it is, I want you to work harder on that project or in that class than you ever have before. Do everything exactly as they ask, and whatever standard they set as an ideal outcome, you should be aiming to surpass that.

Whoever you’re dealing with, your goal is to make them watch you achieve what they could never have done themselves. You want them thinking how amazing you are. Take their negativity and use it to dominate their task with everything you’ve got. Take their motherfucking soul!

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.

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.

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.

When I first glimpsed their helmets lined up beneath the bell, I felt sorry for them because I knew the empty feeling of giving up, but seeing them face to face reminded me that failure is a part of life and now we all had to press on.

I slipped into a bathroom the size of a phone booth and checked in with the Accountability Mirror. Is that really how you feel? Are you sure you’re ready to give up on the SEALs and become a civilian fireman? I stared at myself for five minutes before I shook my head. I couldn’t lie. I had to tell myself the truth, out loud. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid of going through all of that shit again. I’m afraid of day one, week one.”

There is no shame in getting knocked out. The shame comes when you throw in the motherfucking towel, and if I was born to suffer, then I may as well take my medicine.

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.

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.

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.

He had no clue that he was making the classic mistake of measuring himself against others in his class. When he beat them in an evolution or outperformed them during PT, he took a lot of pride in that. It boosted his self-confidence and his performance.

“I was an insecure person with low self esteem trying to grind an axe,” he said, “and my own ego, arrogance, and insecurity made my own life more difficult.” Translation: his mind broke down in ways he’d never experienced before or since.

Soon his crew was down to two men, and he got moved to another boat crew with taller guys. When they lifted the boat head high, he wasn’t even able to reach that motherfucker, and all of his insecurities about his size and his past started caving in on him. “I started to believe that I didn’t belong there,” he said. “That I was genetically inferior. It was like I had superpowers, and I’d lost them. I was in a place in my mind I’d never been, and I didn’t have a road map.”

He had so many experiences along the way he could have leaned on. He’d calloused his mind plenty, but because his foundation was cracked, when shit got real he lost control of his mindset and became a slave to his self doubt.

“The only way to guarantee failure is to quit right now, motherfucker!” I was talking to myself now. Silently screaming over the din of anguish that was crushing my mind and soul.

“Who else would be able to run even one minute on one broken leg, let alone two? Only Goggins! You are twenty minutes in the business, Goggins! You are a fucking machine! Each step you run from now until the end will only make you harder!” That last message cracked the code like a password.

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.

bench pressed 225. This was a real deal power-lifting session, and afterwards we sat on the bench next to one another and watched

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!

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,

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.

I loved waking up at 5 a.m. and starting work with three hours of cardio already in the bank while most of my teammates hadn’t even finished their coffee. It gave me a mental edge, a better sense of self-awareness, and a ton of self-confidence, which made me a better SEAL instructor. That’s what getting up at the ass crack of dawn and putting out will do for you. It makes you better in all facets of your life.

nobody taps their reserve 60 percent right away or all at once. The first step is to remember that your initial blast of pain and fatigue is your governor talking. Once you do that, you are in control of the dialogue in your mind, and you can remind yourself that you are not as drained as you think. That you haven’t given it your all. Not even close. Buying into that will keep you in the fight, and that’s worth an extra 5 percent. Of course, that’s easier read than done.

Who hasn’t dreamed up a possibility for themselves only to have friends, colleagues, or family shit all over it? Most of us are motivated as hell to do anything to pursue our dreams until those around us remind us of the danger, the downside, our own limitations,

They really believe they are doing it for our own good but if you let them, these same people will talk you out of your dreams,

nobody quits an ultra race or Hell Week in a split second. People make the decision to quit hours before they ring that bell,

if you are on the hunt for your 100 percent you should catalog your weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Don’t ignore them.

In the military we always say we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training,

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.

You will realize that if you were underperforming in your physical challenges, there is a good chance you are underperforming at school and work too.

When you’re an enlisted guy and hear an Admiral wants a word, your ass sort of puckers up. He wasn’t supposed to seek me out. There was a chain of command in place specifically to prevent conversations between Rear Admirals and enlisted men like me.

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,

If you get injured or other complications arise that prevent you from working on your primary passion, refocus your energy elsewhere. The activities we pursue tend to be our strengths because its fun to do what we’re great at. Very few people enjoy working on their weaknesses,

The point is not to allow a setback to shatter our focus, or our detours to dictate our mindset. Always be ready to adjust, recalibrate, and stay after it to become better, somehow.

I was tempted to feel sorry for myself. After all, this thing that hit me out of the clear blue changed the entire landscape of my military career, but I’d been training for life, not ultra races, and I refused to hang my head.

I knew that if I maintained a victim’s mentality I wouldn’t get anything at all out of a fucked-up situation, and I didn’t want to sit home defeated all day long. So I used the time to perfect my recruitment presentation. I wrote up sterling AARs and became much more detail oriented in my administrative work.

No matter who you are, life will present you similar opportunities where you can prove to be uncommon. There are people in all walks of life who relish those moments, and when I see them I recognize them immediately because they are usually that motherfucker who’s all by himself.

It’s about thinking of everybody else before yourself and developing your own code of ethics that sets you apart from others. One of those ethics is the drive to turn every negative into a positive, and then when shit starts flying, being prepared to lead from the front.

I found the milk machine, pulled the lever down and watched, confused, as it funneled out, chunky as cottage cheese. I shrugged and sniffed. It smelled all kinds of wrong, but I remember downing that spoiled milk like it was a fresh glass of sweet tea, courtesy of another hellacious special forces school that put us through so much, by the end anybody who survived was grateful for their cold glass of spoiled milk.

Most people do that. The day of graduation, on Valentine’s Day, I flew into Coronado to meet up with my second platoon. Once again, I looked at that lack of lag time as an opportunity to be uncommon. Not that anybody else was watching, but when it comes to mindset, it doesn’t matter where other people’s attention lies. I had my own uncommon standards to live up to.

No matter what you or I achieve, in sports, business, or life, we can’t be satisfied. Life is too dynamic a game. We’re either getting better or we’re getting worse. Yes, we need to celebrate our victories. There’s power in victory that’s transformative, but after our celebration we should dial it down, dream up new training regimens, new goals, and start at zero the very next day.

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.

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.

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.

You can push yourself to a place that is beyond the current capability or temporal mindset of the people you work with, and that’s okay. Just know that your supposed superiority is a figment of your own ego. So don’t lord it over them, because it won’t help you advance as a team or as an individual in your field. Instead of getting angry that your colleagues can’t keep up, help pick your colleagues up and bring them with you!

It felt like I’d hit a glass ceiling, but had it always been there or did I slide it into place myself? The truth was somewhere in between.

Another positive was how I handled my second meltdown. I was off the mat and on the comeback trail before I even saw the ER doc. That’s where you want to be. You can’t let a simple failure derail your mission, or let it worm so far up your ass it takes over your brain and sabotages your relationships with people who are close to you.

After listing out all the plusses, it was time to kick the tires on my mindset, and if you’re doing your post-faceplant due diligence, you should do that too. That means checking yourself on how and what you were thinking during the preparation and execution phases of your failure.

The kid I always judged so harshly didn’t lie and cheat to hurt anyone’s feelings. He did it for acceptance. He broke the rules because he didn’t have the tools to compete and was ashamed for being dumb. He did it because he needed friends. I was afraid to tell the teachers I couldn’t read. I was terrified of the stigma associated with special education, and instead of coming down on that kid for one more second, instead of chastising my younger self, I understood him for the first time.

I released myself and everyone I ever knew from any and all guilt and bitterness. The long list of haters, doubters, racists, and abusers that populated my past, I just couldn’t hate them anymore. I appreciated them because they helped create me.

He began balancing his strength work with extensive stretching and noticed whenever he reached a certain range of motion in a given muscle group or joint, whatever pain lingered, vanished.

He never went to the doctor or physical therapists again because he found his own methodologies much more effective. If an injury cropped up, he treated himself with a stretching regimen.

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.

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.

I’m still getting used to this new, flexible, fully functioning body, and getting accustomed to my new self.

Joe Hippensteel, thanks for showing me the proper ways to stretch. It’s truly changed my life!