“You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft, that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.”

I first heard of David Goggins back in 2018 when I saw a clip of his from the Joe Rogan podcast. Immediately he captured my attention. I then went on to watch other podcasts he appeared on and eventually his book: Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds.

Book Overview

This book covers the incredible story how Goggins, initially an overweight and insecure man, became the fittest man in America by mastering his mind and defying all odds.

How many times do you tell yourself that you’ll head to the gym tomorrow? Only to find that when tomorrow comes, you find an excuse. Imagine living life with zero excuses, what could you accomplish? As Goggins notes in the book, he doesn’t believe in excuses and has transformed his life through the simple power of his mind.

Coming from a traumatic childhood, Goggins found himself in his early twenties working as a cockroach exterminator and weighing just under 300 pounds. Despite the trauma and weight, Goggins went on to become one of the fittest people on the planet. He committed himself to join the Navy SEALs and went on to become a successful ultramarathon runner. Goggins achieved the near-impossible, and within the book, he shares how you can too.

His story reveals how mastering your mind, hard work, and becoming friends with pain can help you achieve the unimaginable.

Key Takeaways

1. Don’t just get motivated. Get obsessed.

Goggins is about much, much more than motivation. He’s about getting “obsessed”. Motivation gets you started, but obsession gets you through every bit of rough terrain until you’re someone you never thought you could be.

Goggins is an obsessive person in some aspects of his life, and he extended it to others. For example, he was obsessive in calling Navy recruiters to give him a chance, even though he was a hundred pounds overweight at the time. He was obsessive in tracking down Air Force Rescuemen until he found the one that gave a speech that inspired him.

He became obsessed with learning, with running and with physical fitness training. He started from an extremely low level in everything. Before taking the test to enter the Air Force, he read like a third grader, and had to teach himself to read so he could pass the tests. And before joining the Navy SEALs, he weighed nearly 300 pounds, more than a hundred pounds over their weight limit, and with only two months to lose the weight. He needed an insane amount of obsession to lose 100 pounds in two months.

2. Callous your mind.

As a way of callousing our minds to making difficult decisions, Goggins is a big advocate of “doing something that sucks” every day. This is especially important in the early stages of any transformation. For him, this was swimming, because he sinks like a stone in water.

But it’s not about self-punishment or torture. He’s encouraging us to callous our minds so that when life throws hardship at us, we can deal with it gracefully.

This is especially important in the beginning stages of any transformation. Trying to keep to a better diet? Watch how your mind trips you up at every instance, trying to give you excuses to get out. You need to fight these inner battle, and ultimate callous (strengthen) your mind.

3. Become personally accountable.

Nearing the end of high school, David Goggins had one big dream: he wanted to join the Air Force as a Pararescue soldier. But he couldn’t do that unless he passed a test called the ASVAB, which could not be cheated on. At the same time, the school sent a letter home saying that he would NOT be graduating high school with his current marks. Those were two huge wake up calls.

So here was the turning point: David went into his bathroom mirror and began talking to himself in a tough way, calling himself an embarrassment and a punk. He “got real” and honestly faced all his worst weaknesses, flaws and failures. He also began setting goals and writing them on notes all around the mirror.He did that little ritual every day and it changed his life.

After that, he began going to the YMCA gym at 5am. He was learning all day and night at the kitchen table, struggling to catch up after all the years of cheating. Most of all, David began facing all discomfort head on, rather than retreating into comfort. As a result, he successfully graduated high school, entered the Air Force, and the rage-filled resentment left his body.

I think David’s story shows the power of negative reinforcement as a tool for personal development. Today this has become almost taboo in our society. We are taught that every painful truth about ourselves must be coated with 10 layers of sugar and positivity to preserve our invisible self esteem. On the other hand, Goggins is not afraid to call himself fat when he’s fat, or dumb when he’s not putting in academic effort. Maybe a few minutes of painful personal confrontation like that is much better in the long run… than a lifetime of denial and regret? I’m not sure, but it’s something we should all think about.

Favourite Quotes

1. You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft, that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.
2. I thought I’d solved a problem when really I was creating new ones by taking the path of least resistance.
3. No one is going to come help you. No one’s coming to save you.
4. It’s a lot more than mind over matter. It takes relentless self discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day.
5. Denial is the ultimate comfort zone.
6. The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself.
7. Everything in life is a mind game! Whenever we get swept under by life’s dramas, large and small, we are forgetting that no matter how bad the pain gets, no matter how harrowing the torture, all bad things end.
8. Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance, and beautiful silence.
9. 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.
10. When you think that you are done, you’re only 40% in to what your body’s capable of doing. That’s just the limits that we put on ourselves.