Read: 2025-10-31
Recommend: 10/10
I achieved a 2:38:02 marathon time, which I’m really proud of! This book has inspired me to aim even higher—my next goal is 2:30. Here is my favorite quote from the book “The world needs doctors, lawyers, and teachers, but we also need savages to prove that we are all capable of so much more.” #neverfinished.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
In his report, Richter suggested that the first round of subjects gave up because they were hopeless and that the second batch persisted for so long because they knew it was possible someone would come along and save their sorry asses. The popular analysis these days is that Richter’s interventions flipped a switch in the rat brain, which illuminated the power of hope for us all to see.
Then there’s the belief born in resilience. It comes from working your way through layers of pain, fatigue, and reason, and ignoring the ever-present temptation to quit until you strike a source of fuel you didn’t even know existed. One that eliminates all doubt, makes you certain of your strength and the fact that eventually, you will prevail, so long as you keep moving forward. That is the level of belief that can defy the expectations of scientists and change everything. It’s not an emotion to be shared or an intellectual concept, and nobody else can give it to you. It must bubble up from within.
It’s funny, we question so many things about the way our lives are going. We wonder what it would be like if we looked different, had more of a head start, or were given a boost at one time or another. Very few people question their own warped minds. Instead, they collect slights, dramas, and problems, hoarding them until they are bloated with stale regret and envy, which form the roadblocks stopping them from becoming their truest, most capable selves. All over the world, hundreds of millions of people choose to live that way. But there is another way of thinking and another way of being. It helped me regain control of my life. It allowed me to eviscerate all obstacles in my path until my growth factor became damn near limitless. I’m still haunted, but I’ve traded in my demons for evil-ass angels, and now, it’s a good haunting. I’m haunted by my future goals, not my past failures. I’m haunted by what I may still become. I’m haunted by my own continued thirst for evolution
I suppose I was in that Denny’s booth with him because part of me was hoping Trunnis would apologize, but he didn’t think he had anything to be sorry for. He was straight-up delusional, and his delusions demoralized all of us. They were also contagious. For years, he made me bleed, and he made me doubt myself. He transferred his demons to me through the lashes of his leather belt and the open palm of his hand, and like him, I grew up believing in delusions. I hadn’t become an evil sociopath, but like him, I never took responsibility for my own shortcomings or my failures. Sitting there listening to him rave made my blood run hot. Sweat beaded on my forehead and all I could think about was payback. It was his turn to suffer at my hands. I wanted to make him bleed for my pain. I wanted to beat that motherfucker down right there in Denny’s. I was hair-trigger close to allowing my father to turn me into a violent maniac just like I remembered him to be!
I’d spent my entire life in surface waters hoping that my luck would change and everything I’d dreamed of would fall into place for me. That night, on my drive home to Indiana, I accepted the hard truth that hoping and wishing are like gambling on long shots, and if I wanted to be better, I had to start living every day with a sense of urgency. Because that is the only way to turn the odds in your favor.
Once we’re born, our natural instinct is to look for ways to thrive. But not everybody does, and sometimes, there’s a damn good reason for it. I was brought up in darkness. My roots were flimsy. I was barely tethered to rock-hard ground. My spirit, soul, and determination weren’t nourished in the light, but on that ride home, I realized that only I have the power to determine my future, and I had a choice to make. I could continue living in the Haven of Low Expectations, where it was comfortable and safe to believe that my life was not my fault or my responsibility and that my dreams were just that—fantasies that would never be because time and opportunity were not and would never be on my side. Or I could leave all that behind for a world of possibility, much more pain, unfathomably hard work, and zero guarantees of success. I could choose resilience.
I had never been a POW like John McCain and countless others, but I lived like a prisoner in my own mind for the first twenty-four years of my life. Once I’d liberated myself and begun to evolve, I learned that it is the rare warrior who embraces the adversity of being born into hell and then, with their own free will, chooses to add as much suck as they can find to turn each day into a boot camp of resiliency. Those are the ones who don’t stop at good enough. They aren’t satisfied with just being better than they used to be. They are forever evolving and striving for the highest level of self. Eventually, I became one of them, which is why I was honored at the VFW Convention.
Picture a shattered leg twisted way up over the victim’s head. When you see a limb in a place it does not belong, it’s easy to become fixated. It looks so gruesome that human instinct is to address that problem first and block everything else out. I’ve seen a lot of EMS personnel get sucked down that rabbit hole, but a badly broken and dislocated leg typically won’t kill anyone, unless it distracts us from realizing that their airway is also blocked or that they are gurgling because their lungs are filled with fluid and they are in danger of bleeding out internally. A distracting injury, in the EMS universe, is anything that entices a medical professional to forget their procedures. It can happen to anyone, which is why we are trained to remain alert to those distractions. It truly is a matter of life or death. The same can be said of the distracting injuries I carried. By the time I turned twenty-four, I was too distracted by child abuse, neglect, and racist taunts to see all of the fucked-up things in my life over which I had direct influence. Nothing that happened to me could be considered a fatal condition on its own, yet I spent so much time worrying about what my father did to us, and felt so alone, I was refusing to live. And when you spend your life regretting what was or asking, “Why me?” you eventually die having accomplished nothing at all.
It’s so easy to get lost in the fog of life. Tragedy hunts us all, and any event that causes suffering will linger longer than it should if you let it. Because our sad stories enable us to grade ourselves on a forgiving curve. They give us latitude and justification to stay lazy, weak-minded motherfuckers, and the longer it takes for us to process that pain, the harder it is to reclaim our lives. Sometimes, weakness and laziness are rooted in hate and anger, and until we receive the confession, apology, or compensation we believe we are owed, we stay stuck in our shit as a form of self-righteous rebellion against our tormentors or even against life itself. Some of us become entitled. We think our pain entitles us to feel sorry for ourselves or that we are entitled to good fortune because we’ve survived hell. Of course, feeling entitled doesn’t make it so. Understand, the clock is always ticking, and at some point, your golden hour will expire unless you take action. People who get lost in their past, the ones who bore their friends and family with the same tragic story over and over without showing a hint of progress, remind me of a skydiver who becomes too fixated on their tangled parachute. They know they have a backup ready to go but burn so much time trying to fix the primary chute that they forget to track their altimeter, and by the time they cut the first chute away and pull the second ripcord, it’s too late. Part of the problem is that they have become terrified of pulling that second cord because if it’s also fucked up, then they truly will be helpless. That is a mental trap set by fear. We cannot afford to remain afraid of cutting away dead weight to save ourselves.
If an act of God or nature tore your life apart, the good news is that you really have nobody to blame. Yet, the randomness of it all can feel so personal, as if you’ve been marked for doom by the fates. If you feel wronged by somebody else, you may be waiting on a confession or an apology in order to move forward, but I’m sorry to say the apology—that tearful confession you’ve been dreaming of—will never come. The good news is you don’t need anybody else to free you from your trauma. You can do it on your own.
It had been three years since I’d last seen and communicated with my brother, in the days after his eldest daughter was killed. We’ve always had an awkward relationship because our perspectives on our childhood are so different. When my dad was abusing us, my brother always attempted to be a peacemaker, and that required him to make excuses for our father no matter how vicious he was. He wanted everything to be kumbaya. When our dad came after our mother, Trunnis Jr. made it a point to escape to his room, while I made sure to watch. I saw things as they really were, and that made me a fighter. Trunnis Jr. remembers things as he wished they had been. I’ve never blamed him for it. We were all doing our best to survive somehow. My mom couldn’t protect either of us. She was getting her ass beat just as badly as we were. It was as if there were four different versions of the same reality show streaming from the same house all at once. The dissonance was impossible not to feel and absorb.
For survivors of trauma, denial is a tantalizing numbing agent. It allows you to rewrite your past and sell yourself some fiction. In my brother’s tale, Buffalo was a happy place, and our father was a pillar of the community. When we were kids, he forgave our father quicker than a priest in a confessional, and as an adult, his selective memory gives his childhood a brighter sheen, which makes him feel less damaged. But whether he wants to acknowledge it or not, damage was done. If he had experienced things the way my mom and I had, he wouldn’t subject her to a stroll through his personal fantasyland, as if Buffalo weren’t the torture chamber she’d had to escape many years ago.
Denial is self-protecting, but it’s also self-limiting. Accepting your full truth, including all your faults, imperfections, and missteps, allows you to evolve, expand your possibilities, seek redemption, and explore your true potential. And until you unpack your baggage, it will be impossible to know what your potential really is. The whole truth can’t haunt you if it serves you.
From: Ed Victor Date: June 27, 2016, 6:46:16 AM PDT To: David Cc: Jennifer Kish Subject: Your book Dear David I said I would get back to you on Monday, so here I am…but you are not going to like what I have to say. …my assessment of its value—and its sales potential—are in no way aligned with yours. I could be wrong—I certainly have been in the past!—but I don’t see this as a book that will command a big advance and sell large amounts of copies… When I told you I would be honest in my reaction to this project, you warned me that, if I said No, I’d then see it high up on the NY Times Bestseller List and deeply regret my decision. You may well be right, but because my assessment of the value and commercial prospects of the book are so far below yours, I would not be the right agent for it. You need someone with 101% enthusiasm who will go out and prove me hopelessly wrong (not for the first time). … All best Ed PS I will tell Marcus about my decision, since it was he who tried to bring us together.
What Ed Victor saw as a disadvantage—the fact that I couldn’t be easily defined and sold—was actually my greatest asset. My approach, background, and accomplishments all proved one thing: I am the ultimate underdog. That’s been the truth my whole life, and if no one could see my potential, it would be up to me to show them what they missed.
You cannot be afraid to disappoint people. You have to live the life you want to live. Sometimes, that means being the motherfucker who can put a middle finger up to everyone in the room and be totally comfortable with that.
“You’re on the New York Times Best Seller list,” Kish said. She looked up from her laptop and flashed a smile. She was proud, and I was too. Not because I gave two shits about the New York Times Best Seller list, or even that it was selling at all, but because I knew the book was an honest reflection of my life and all I put into it. And, admittedly, after being told that making any best seller list was “absolutely not going to happen” and “impossible” for a self-published book by a first-time author, it was satisfying to defy the odds one more time.
The day after Christmas is dead in most public places, but holiday season in the ER is always bumping. Maybe it’s the alcohol, the family strife, the loneliness, or a combination of all three. When I was fourteen years old, my mother’s fiancé, Wilmoth, was shot and killed the day after Christmas, which is why whenever the calendar leans into late December, I think more about trauma than Santa.
I believed my role on this earth was to suffer and overcome so I could teach others how to do the same, but now that that period of my life appeared to be over, I had to wonder: was I suddenly expendable? My self-talk flip-flopped between feeling sorry for myself and being royally pissed. My anxiety was off the charts. I was not sneering at death like back in the day. I was afraid. Desperate for more life.
This is how life works. One second, you are talking about the New York Times Best Seller list, and the next, you run the risk of not being able to live to see tomorrow. It literally happens that quickly.
If the doctors told me that I had to stop running and working out hard in the gym, I would cancel everything. I’d pull the plug on all future speaking engagements and on my social media channels. I’ve always been a man of action and service, and I know I would not be able to inspire people by simply talking about the things I did in my past. I gave myself one rule before joining social media: if I can’t live it, I won’t speak it. Before I bedded down that night, I decided that if my body wouldn’t cooperate anymore, Can’t Hurt Me would be my swan song, and I would disappear.
Many people write out their darkest moments in a journal or diary and hope to gain some leverage on whatever it is they survived or are struggling to overcome. I’ve kept a journal for years, but there are levels to this shit, and a written archive is the entry level. Audio recordings are more interactive and accessible and have a more profound effect on the mind. If you were bullied, abused, or sexually assaulted and are willing to speak the unfiltered truth into the microphone and listen to it over and over, after a period of time, it will become just another story. A powerful story, for sure, but the poison will be neutralized, and the power will be yours.
One day a couple of years ago, not long after ramping up my training from ten miles of running per day to twenty or more, I felt drained and sore, too tired to run, and kept telling myself that I needed a day off. As I relaxed on the couch, I tuned into my self-talk. Then, I grabbed my recorder and whined into the microphone. I wanted to hear how it sounded out loud. I was real with myself. I cataloged my recent runs and nagging injuries and described how I thought a day off might help me. I made a solid case for a much-needed rest day, but when I played it back, the jury of one was unconvinced. Because my inner bitch was suddenly the emperor with no clothes. Buck naked in the light of day, he was impossible to ignore and even harder to stomach. I was off the couch and out on the road in a matter of seconds.
The way we speak to ourselves in moments of doubt is crucial, whether or not the stakes are high. Because our words become actions, and our actions build habits that can coat our minds and bodies with the plaque of ambivalence, hesitancy, and passivity and separate us from our own lives.
Lately, I’ve used this technique with the hate that comes at me online. Most people in my position don’t read negative comments or emails. They have someone else screen and then erase them. I see hate as just another fuel source. I see the beauty and power in it, and I never let it go to waste. When the negative comments come in, and they always do, I capture them in a screenshot and speak them into my microphone. In 2021, I posted an image of my swollen left knee, which inspired a flood of negative comments. Some claimed to have seen my breakdown coming and counted it as a personal win. Others simply liked seeing me in pain. “I’m tired of hearing you run your fucking mouth,” one of them wrote. “I hope I never see your Black ass run again,” wrote another. They were trying to salt my wounds. They wanted me to feel the sting, which I did, and hoped it would bring me down even further. It didn’t. I loved those comments. I loved them so much I made a mixtape. I printed them all out, recorded myself saying each one, and then I looped that bitch. Whenever I have a bad day, I listen to it. Sometimes, I walk around the house savoring it in full stereo.
Most people only mine the positive shit. They want everything and everyone to be nice and hunky-dory. They get filled up on sweetness and recoil from the dark, bitter pill of hate. But there’s not nearly as much fuel in ass-kissing, atta’ boys, and accolades as there is in hate. Luckily, the world is filled with jealous, insecure haters. If you don’t get negative comments on social media, find your fuel in the thoughtless comment of a friend or the doubt of a teacher or coach. I’m sure it stings when you feel slighted, underestimated, criticized, or excluded. Just know that the heat you feel is free energy waiting to be burned. Don’t crawl up in a corner worried about the people who disrespect you. Repackage what you’re hearing and feeling until it works for you! That is a winner’s mentality. Winners in life see everything they experience and everything they hear, see, and feel as pure energy. They train their minds to find it. They drop into the gnarly crevices to mine golden nuggets of trauma, doubt, and hate. They do not live disposable, single-use lives. They discard nothing and refurbish everything. They find strength in the bullying and heartbreak, in their defeats and failures. They harvest it from the people who hate them personally and from the online trolls too. Some people go to sleep with a meditation app. Others open the windows to the night sounds or stream white noise, whale songs, or the lullaby of the sea lapping some lonely shore. When I bed down at night, I listen to my haters. And it’s obvious those punk-ass bitches don’t have the slightest idea who they are dealing with. I’m the person who turns their every negative word into my positive progress. I take what they serve me, roll it up in that wrapping paper I saved way back when, and shove it right up their fucking asses in the form of another work-out, another long run, and another year of leveling the fuck up. Honestly, I should thank them. They make me stronger and more determined to achieve my goals. Which only makes them hate me even more.
If you don’t feel like you’re good enough, if your life lacks meaning and time feels like it’s slipping through your fingers, there is only one option. Recreate yourself in your own Mental Lab. Somewhere you can be alone with your thoughts and wrestle with the substance of what and who you want to be in your one short life on earth. If it feels right, create an alter ego to access some of that dark matter in your own mind.
The world needs doctors, lawyers, and teachers, but we also need savages to prove that we are all capable of so much more.
Everything in life comes down to how we handle those crucial seconds. When psychological, physical, or emotional pressure redlines, your adrenal glands go haywire, and you are no longer in control. What separates a true savage from everybody else is the ability to regain control of their mind in that split second, despite the fact that all is still fucked! That’s what people miss. Our lives aren’t built on hours, days, weeks, months, or years. Hell Week is 130 hours, but it’s not the hours that kill you. And it’s not the pain, the exhaustion, or the cold. It is the 468,000 seconds that you must win. It only takes one of those motherfuckers—when it all becomes too much and you just can’t take it anymore—to bring you down. I had to remain vigilant and manage my mind for every single one of those seconds to make it.
It helps to remind yourself of what you’re good at and where you excel so when you have to engage in something that is hard for you, it doesn’t become overwhelming. Tell yourself, I’m good here. I’m great there. This sucks, but it will be over in twenty minutes. Maybe it’s twenty miles or twenty days or twenty weeks, but it doesn’t matter. Every experience on earth is finite. It will end someday, and that makes it doable, but the outcome hinges on those crucial seconds you must win! There are consequences to this shit. Quitting on a dream stays with you. It can color how you see yourself and the decisions you make going forward. Several men have taken their own lives after quitting SEAL training. Others marry the first person who comes around because they are so desperate for validation. Of course, the reverse is also true. If you can withstand the suffering, take a knee, and make a conscious One-Second Decision in a critical juncture, you will learn perseverance and gain strength by winning the moment. You will know what it takes and how it feels to overcome all that loud doubt, and that will stay with you too. It will become a powerful skill you can use again and again to find success, no matter what scenario you’re in or where life takes you.
Maybe you finished Ultraman or graduated from Harvard. I do not care. Respect is earned every day by waking up early, challenging yourself with new dreams or digging up old nightmares, and embracing the suck like you have nothing and have never done a damn thing in your life.
I’d learned long ago that no matter what type of event or challenge I engage in, the only competition that ever matters is me against me.
We all have that ferocity—that dog—inside us. It’s a natural response to provocation, a close cousin of the survival instinct, but most of us keep it chained up and locked away behind closed doors because that savage side of ourselves doesn’t mix well with this “civilized” world. It’s obsessive. It’s always hungry, always looking for scraps of nourishment and finds them in competition, failure, and disrespect. I used to open that door on a regular basis, but as my life changed, I locked that beast away like almost everybody else and started letting those slights go. Any shade tossed in my direction was shed quicker than water down a duck’s back. I’d matured and decided to live a more balanced life. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn’t all good either.
If you want to maximize minimal potential and become great in any field, you must embrace your savage side and become imbalanced, at least for a period of time. You’ll need to funnel every minute of every single day into the pursuit of that degree, that starting spot, that job, that edge. Your mind must never leave the cockpit. Sleep at the library or the office. Hoop long past sundown and fall asleep watching film of your next opponent. There are no days off, and there is no downtime when you are obsessed with being great. That is what it takes to be the baddest motherfucker ever at what you do.
The irony is you build those walls to protect yourself. You think they will make you hard and less vulnerable, but they isolate you in solitary confinement with your darkest thoughts and ugliest memories. You convince yourself that somehow you deserve to be there due to the bad life decisions you made. You believe that you are not worthy of more, or something better, and that the damage can’t be undone. You are filled with endless shame. When you look in the mirror, you don’t see yourself for who you are. And what keeps you locked up in your prison is that false narrative that you continually feed yourself and the false reflection you can’t escape because it is part of you.
It is truly amazing what the mind can do when you fail to rebuild yourself consciously. My dad was a gangster and a crook. Her previous fiancé had been murdered in his own garage, and for an encore, she would marry a convicted murderer less than a week after his release from prison. My mom was looking for someone she could save because she did not have the strength to save herself. But the marriage did not go well. They would divorce within two years. He would relapse and eventually die of an overdose many years later.
We are too often told that anger is an unhealthy emotion, but when someone or something has stolen your soul and destroyed your life, anger is a natural response. I am not talking about irrational rage, which can be disastrous and lead you down an even darker hole. I am talking about controlled anger, which is a natural source of energy that can wake you the fuck up and help you realize that what you went through wasn’t right. I have cracked open anger several times. It has warmed me when I was freezing, it has turned my fear into bravery, and it has given me fight when I had none. And it can do the same for you. Anger will snap you out of the spell you’re in until you are no longer willing to remain confined in your mental prison. You’ll be scratching and clawing at the walls, looking for cracks where the light leaks in. Your fingernails will be broken, the tips of your fingers bloody and raw, and you will continue to fight to expand those cracks because your anger will be purifying and the human mind loves progress. Keep at it, and eventually, those walls will tumble until you are free, standing in a debris field one more time, with your eyes wide open. That’ll work. Because destruction always breeds creation.
Life is not G-rated. We must prepare kids for the world as it is. Our generation is training kids to become full-fledged members of Entitlement Nation, which ultimately makes them easy prey for the lions among us. Our ever-softening society doesn’t just affect children. Adults fall into the same trap. Even those of us who have achieved great things. Every single one of us is just another frog in the soon-to-be-boiling water that is our soft-ass culture. We take unforeseen obstacles personally. We are ready to be outraged at all times by the evil bullshit of the world. Believe me, I know all about evil and have dealt with more bullshit than most, but if you catalog your scars to use them as excuses or a bargaining chip to make life easier for yourself, you’ve missed an opportunity to become better and grow stronger. Sgt. Jack knew what awaited me as an adult. He was preparing me for the grip of life. Whether he knew it or not, the man was training me to be a savage. The evolutionary equation is the exact same for everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are. You could be a young person looking to tap into your power and become great or a mid-life adult or senior who’s never done a fucking thing but wants to achieve something before it’s too late. Or maybe you’ve achieved a lot but are overcoming injury or illness or are simply uninspired and caught in emotional and physical quicksand. First, you must recognize that you have fallen off or are perpetually falling short. Next, accept that you are on your own. Nobody will come save you. They may show you an example, like Sgt. Jack did for me and I’m doing for you right now, but it will be up to you to do the work. Then, you must become a disciple of discipline.
Discipline builds mental endurance because when effort is your main priority, you stop looking for everything to be enjoyable. Our phones and social media have turned too many of us inside out with envy and greed as we get inundated with other people’s success, their new cars and houses, big contracts, resort vacations, and romantic getaways. We see how much fun everyone else is having and feel like the world is passing us by, so we bitch about it and then wonder why we are not where we want to be. When you become disciplined, you don’t have time for that bullshit. Your insecurities become alarm bells reminding you that doing your chores or homework to the utmost of your ability and putting in extra time on the job or in the gym are requirements for a life well-lived. A drive for self-optimization and daily repetition will build your capacity for work and give you confidence that you can take on more. With discipline as your engine, your workload and output will double, then triple. What you won’t see, at least not at first, is the fact that your own personal evolution has begun to bear fruit. You won’t see it because you’ll be too busy taking action. Discipline does not have a belief system. It transcends class, color, and gender. It cuts through all the noise and strife. If you think that you are behind the eight ball for whatever reason, discipline is the great equalizer. It erases all disadvantages. Nowadays, it doesn’t matter where you are from or who you are; if you are disciplined, there will be no stopping you.
People who feel sorry for themselves are obsessed with their own problems and their own fate. Is that really much different than the greedy and egotistical people who want to feel better than everybody else? The higher I climb in my life, the more I realize how much I need to mop that floor. Because that’s where all the knowledge is. There is no grit at the top, no tests of resolve in steak dinners, five-star hotels, or spa treatments. Once you make it in this world, you have to freefall back to the bottom in some way to keep learning and growing. I call this “trained humility.” It’s a shedding of your skin that allows you to take on a mission that no one else can see and do whatever needs to be done next. Trained humility is service but also strength. Because, when you are humble enough to remember that you’ll never know it all, each lesson you learn only makes you hungrier to learn more, and that will put you on a path that guarantees you will grow all the way to the grave.
I knew that there were no tricks around fear. The only way to neutralize it was to commit to doing the fucking thing that freaked me out and then proceed to outsmart my fear through knowledge and preparation.
That’s why I never get emotional or over-excited at the beginning of something hard. The same is true when it comes to monitoring my progress. I never celebrate anything in the middle of a race. Better to stay calm, focused on my own shit, and aware that what I’ve gotten myself into is not a game and that there are hungry forces well beyond my control waiting to pounce from behind. A 240-mile run will never be a joy ride. If you’re feeling happy with yourself, odds are the tide is about to turn.
All I know is this: I am David Fucking Goggins. I exist; therefore, I complete what I start. I take pride in my effort and in my performance in all phases of life. Just because I am here! If I’m lost, I will find myself. As long as I’m on planet Earth, I will not half-ass it. Anywhere I lack, I will improve because I exist and I am willing. This is the mentality we should all strive for when we’re stuck. Because when you’re in the hurt locker, you must be your own motivator, your own drill instructor. In the dark moments, you must remind yourself why you chose to be there in the first place. That takes an edgy tone. When you’re all fucked up and looking for more, the only tone you should allow inside your head is the tone of a warrior. The tone of someone prepared to plunge deep inside their own soul to find the energy they need to keep up the fight and prevail!
I’m often mistaken for a masochist. Some people think I push past pain and take unreasonable risks for sport or spectacle, but that’s not true. I push a lot harder than most, but I don’t do it to injure myself or impress others, and I sure as hell don’t want to die. I do it because the body and mind never fail to amaze me.
From the outside looking in, my Moab 240 was a disaster. I got lost, nearly froze my ass off, and had multiple medical meltdowns. I went off course twice. It was messy, but I consider it one of my top five performances ever because I never should have completed that distance in the time allowed. But I did. Yes, the scoreboard still read: Moab 1, Goggins 0, but I left Utah with a precious gift.
My evolution had begun, but as my Navy SEAL future crystallized over the next several months, I learned that when you change, not everyone in your life will be on board. You will get some serious resistance, and it will be a pain in your ass. Everywhere I turned, I found family members, friends, and coworkers resistant to my evolution because they loved the Ecolab-spraying, chocolate-shake-slurping fat ass. At three hundred pounds, I made them feel much better about themselves, which is another way of saying, they were holding me back.
When I first made the decision to try to become a Navy SEAL, the only person in my foxhole was my mom. She knew what it entailed and was immediately on board. I didn’t see any fear in her eyes. While she was worried about me, she believed in what I was doing even more, and that allowed me to train and fight with a clear head and maximum focus. Years later, when I ran Badwater, she was in my crew. I walked one hundred of those 135 miles, and when horseflies were all over me and I was suffering in the heat, she got out of the support vehicle, sobbing. Not because I was in pain, but because she was proud of me. Because I was pushing through it all like a fucking warrior. Not all friends and loved ones react that way when you change and become committed to perpetual growth. Some are genuinely offended, and you don’t need or want their voices in your head. Which is a nice way of saying you may be required to shitcan some motherfuckers along the way. Who you hang around and speak to on the daily matters. That’s why it is not a successful formula for people in drug and alcohol recovery to continue to hang out with the people they used to party with if they want to stay sober. When you evolve, your inner circle must evolve with you. Otherwise, you may subconsciously halt your own growth to avoid outpacing and losing contact with the people who mean a lot to you but may not be able to hang with you.
Don’t ever tell me you want to run a marathon because I will sign you up for a race, monitor your daily training, and run that shit with you. If you tell me you want to be a doctor, I’ll be the motherfucker who enrolls you in med school while you’re sleeping, and you’ll wake up to a class first thing in the morning. Most people can’t handle that level of intensity. But that’s the kind of backing I want. The type that comes with an expectation of effort and demands hours, weeks, and even years of hard work. Because that is exactly what it takes to fulfill lofty ambitions and, more important than that, find out what you are truly capable of.
The minute I got home from Moab, I went for a run. Training for next year’s race was underway that quickly, and I was fired up! Running had long ago become like breathing to me. It wasn’t a hobby; it was damn near a subconscious biological reflex. I had to do it. I didn’t necessarily enjoy it, but I could tell on that initial eight-mile shakeout that there was going to be something very different about this training block. I could already feel the fire. Day after day, I could not wait to get the fuck after it, and I trained with reckless abandon.
It’s an unwritten natural law of the universe that you will be tested. You will get smacked in the fucking face. A hurricane will land on your head. It’s inevitable for all of us. Yet, we are not formally taught how to handle unexpected adversity. We have sex education, fire drills, active-shooter drills, and curriculum on the dangers of alcohol and drugs, but there is no rug-just-got-pulled-out-from-under-you class. Nobody teaches how to think, act, and move when disappointment, bad news, malfunction, and disaster inevitably strike. All the advice floods in only after we are already lying dazed on the canvas. Which means it’s up to you to cultivate your own strategy and have the discipline to practice it.
“Roger that” is a ticket back to your life, no matter what happens. You may be laid off, run down, flunked out, cut, or dumped. You could be a stressed-out, bullied young kid, an overweight veteran with no prospects, or simply handed a pair of crutches and told to sit tight on the sidelines for as long as it takes to heal. The answer is always “Roger-fucking-that.” Scream it out loud. Tell them all that you heard what they had to say and that they can expect your very best in return. And don’t forget to smile. A smile that reminds them that you are most dangerous when you’re cornered. That is how you respond to a setback. It’s the most efficient way to deal with adversity and come out clean.
But it’s important that your goal isn’t too readily attainable. I like to set audacious goals during dark times. Too often, motherfuckers are convinced that they are challenging themselves by aiming to accomplish something they’ve done countless times before.
I am a student of life. I carry around a notebook. I keep logs. I study all the upswings and down currents of my days as if the final exam is tomorrow. Because we all have an exam tomorrow. Whether we realize it or not, every interaction, each task is a reflection of your mindset, values, and future prospects. It’s an opportunity to be the person you’ve always wanted to be. You don’t have to have survived trauma or become a physical beast to train for life. We’ve all been challenged physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and we’ve all failed. Don’t be shy about digging through your lost archives. No matter how irrelevant those experiences seem now, they count because they were all dry runs for whatever comes next.
Just as stem cells produce a growth factor that stimulates cellular communication, muscle growth, and wound healing in the body, fear is a seedpod packed with growth factor for the mind. When you deliberately and consistently confront your fear of heights or particular people, places, and situations that unsettle you, those seeds germinate, and your confidence grows exponentially. You might still hate jumping off high things or swimming beyond the waves, but your willingness to keep doing it will help you make peace with it. You may even be inspired to try to master it. That’s how a kid who was afraid of the water his whole life became a Navy SEAL.
I was picking a fight with a guy who loves a good fight because I knew it would bring more out of both of us, which is what I needed.
when I traveled as a recruiter, I used to sign up for any ultra races I could find if they were on the way to where I was going. I called them layovers.
However, the world being what it is, not five miles later, on that same highway, a beat-to-shit pickup crept alongside me. I turned and glanced at the kid in the passenger seat just as he hollered, “Nigger!” I shook my head as they drove on, but his ignorance didn’t fuck with me. That was his problem. In fact, the word he’d hoped would wound me bounced right off me. I was on the verge of running five hundred miles of ultra races in less than six weeks. That is a monumental output, and the reason I pulled it off is because I am focused on being my best at all times. When you live that way, there is no time to donate to small-town racists or anyone else whose perspective is defined by their narrow minds. At this point in my life, the supposedly offensive, unspeakable word with its dark, violent history has been reduced to a chain of harmless symbols: consonants and vowels that don’t mean a damn thing.
That’s what a self-leader does, no matter how busy their lives are. Not because they are obsessed with being the best, but because they are striving to become their best.
I took my own oath to self: I live with a Day One, Week One mentality. This mentality is rooted in self-discipline, personal accountability, and humility. While most people stop when they’re tired, I stop when I am done. In a world where mediocrity is often the standard, my life’s mission is to become uncommon amongst the uncommon.
ome people use their new circumstances to dial down their effort level instead of adjusting their approach and still giving it their all to achieve their goals. You’ve got to work with what you have. I couldn’t run or ruck, but that didn’t mean I was out of the fight. No matter what you are dealing with, your goal should be to maximize the resources and capabilities you do have. If you’ve suffered a freak injury or received a diagnosis that changes everything, what does your new maximum effort level look like? A lot of people bide their time and wait to see what happens next, but a year or two later, they find they are still waiting. With every unfortunate turn in life, no matter how heavy the weight, you have to be committed to pushing back against that pressure with effort. No matter your age, abilities, disabilities, or responsibilities, we must all stay committed to finding our new benchmarks. Because not only does that keep your mind engaged and your demons at bay, you actually might achieve things the old you never could have conceived.
Most people live their whole lives without ever contemplating what it means to be great. To them, greatness looks like Steph Curry, Rafael Nadal, Toni Morrison, Georgia O’Keeffe, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Amelia Earhart. They put all the greats on a pedestal but think of themselves as mere mortals. And that’s exactly why greatness eludes them. They turn it into some untouchable plane, impossible for almost anybody to reach, and it never even crosses their mind to aim for it. No matter what I’m doing or which arena I’m engaging in, I will always aim for greatness because I know that we are all mere mortals and greatness is possible for anyone and everyone if they are willing to seek it out in their own soul. In Gogglish terms, greatness is a state of letting go of all your faults and imperfections, scavenging every last bit of strength and energy, and putting it the fuck to use to excel at whatever you set your mind to. Even if some motherfucker out there told you it was impossible. It is a feeling pursued by those rare souls willing to extend themselves beyond reason and pay the cost.
Just as words can be redefined, never doubt that we can redefine ourselves. It can feel impossible at times because we live in a world filled with arbitrary boundaries and fixed social lines that are as thick as the walls around a fortress. Worse, we allow those walls to limit us in too many ways. The brainwashing starts early, and it starts at home. The people we grow up with and the environments we grow up in define who we think we are and what we think life is all about. When you’re young, you can only know what you see, and if all you are ever exposed to are lazy people, content with mediocrity or who convince you of your own worthlessness, greatness will remain a fantasy.
Identity is a trap that will keep you in blinders if you let it. Sometimes, identity is what we are saddled with by society. Other times, it’s a category we claim. It can be empowering to associate yourself with a particular culture, group, job, or lifestyle, but it can also be limiting. If you stick with your own too closely, you will be susceptible to groupthink, and you may never learn who you really are or what you can accomplish. I know people who were so obsessed with landing a specific job that once they settled in to that role, they clipped their own wings. They never moved on or attempted to try anything new, and that blocked them from evolving and developing new skills.
My environment and my history made me overanxious and stressed out. The color of my skin made me a mark. I was prejudged and vulnerable at almost every turn, and it was my job to defy all of that. No matter how troubled or hopeless or sheltered your environment is, it is your job, your obligation, your duty, and your responsibility to yourself to find the blue-to-black line—that glimmer—buried in your soul and seek greatness. Nobody can show you that glimmer. You must do the work to discover it on your own. There are no prerequisites to becoming great. You could be raised by a pack of wolves. You could be homeless and illiterate at thirty years old and graduate from Harvard at forty. You could be one of the most accomplished motherfuckers in the country and still be hungrier and work harder than everybody else you know as you attempt to conquer a new field. And it all starts with a commitment to looking beyond your known world. Beyond your street, town, state, or nationality. Beyond culture and identity. Only then can true self-exploration begin. After that comes the real work. Fighting those demons every morning and all day long is maddening. Because they only ever want to break you down. They don’t encourage you or make you feel good about yourself or your long odds as you fight through all the toxic mold and crust that is self-hate, doubt, and loneliness. They want to limit you. They want you to surrender and retreat back to what you know. They want you to quit before you get to pliability, where the sacrifice, hard work, and isolation that felt so heavy for so long become your haven. Where after struggling to visualize greatness for years, it is effortless. That’s when momentum will gather like an updraft and send you airborne and spiraling toward the outer limits of your known world.
Because I was not content to just show up hoping to graduate. When you’re on the older side of the age spectrum, you often get more credit than you deserve for simply showing up to do something physically challenging. Nobody expects much from you, and the temptation is there to perform to those very low expectations. Showing up is an important first step, but if you plan to show up, you may as well show the fuck out.
A lot of the PT we did came with unknown distance and time because when fighting a fire, you never know when the exertion, the work, or the suffering might end, and the instructors wanted to see how our minds and bodies responded to the unknown element. That shit was tailor-made for me. The longer the run, the heavier the pack, the more intense the gym session, the greater the suck, the better I got. Those young guns may have been faster on the short course, but I almost always outlasted them.
Back in SEAL training, I loved when people froze up and quit. I felt it elevated me in some way, but that was ego-driven immaturity and poor leadership. These days, I consider it my business to make everyone better, no matter the job or situation. During my interview with the North Peace Smokejumpers, I was asked to describe my best quality. “If you hire me,” I said, “everyone in my class will graduate. That’s my best quality.” It wasn’t an empty promise. It was an oath.
A lot of people let a realization like that limit their future. They lose their edge and scale back their ambitions and expectations to protect themselves. They retire and quit pushing themselves into uncomfortable environments and challenging situations. Much of that has to do with the age pass down. There’s a pass down for everything in life. When it comes to age, we seem to share a common misperception of how we should feel or where we should be based on a number when sometimes, the problem isn’t chronological. Often it isn’t Father Time that is fucking you up but his brother, Father Fatigue. They say that you can’t beat Father Time, and that may be true, but you can damn sure make his brother feel your resistance, and if you are willing to outlast the headwinds of fatigue minute by minute, hour by hour, day after day, you can at least meet Father Time face to face and negotiate with him. Whenever I felt too tired or sore to get out of bed, I kept my eyes on the horizon and reminded myself that smokejumper training is temporary. Some mornings, it actually felt good to be so fucked up because that was a sign that I was still willing to turn myself inside out to look for that blue-to-black line and do something that spoke to my soul.
But it doesn’t matter where you come from or what you look like, we are all hindered by supposedly fixed social lines. Whatever your gender, culture, religion, or age, there are things that you’ve been told your kind just does not do. Which is why there has got to be somebody in every family, neighborhood, culture, nation, and generation who breaks the mold and changes the way others think about society and their place in it. There has got to be someone willing to be an outlier. A savage who sees those walls and barriers that are constantly trying to close us off and divide us up and then breaks them down again by showing everyone what is possible. There’s got to be someone who demonstrates greatness and makes everyone around them think differently.
I am always on the hunt for another twisted pretzel of a maze to get lost in because that’s where I find myself. The smooth road to success is of no use to savages like me. That may sound ideal, but it won’t test us. It doesn’t demand belief, so it will never make us great. We all build belief in different ways. I clock countless hours in the gym, where I log thousands of reps and run and ride my bike obscene distances, to cultivate belief. Despite what you may think, I don’t consider myself an ultra-athlete because those races are not who I am. They are tools. Each one provides me a stockpile of faith so when I get stuck in the maze of life like a broke-down savage, I still believe I am capable of achieving my unreasonable goals, such as becoming a smokejumper at forty-seven years old, no matter what society or the good doctor says.
Nothing in my life has ever happened for me on the first try. It took me three cracks to get through Navy SEAL training. I had to take the ASVAB five times and failed twice before breaking the Guinness World Record for most pull ups in twenty-four hours. But by then, failure had long since been neutralized. When I set an unreasonable goal and fall short, I don’t even look at it as failure anymore. It is simply my first, second, third, or tenth attempt. That is what belief does for you. It takes failure out of the equation completely because you go in knowing the process will be long and arduous, and that is what the fuck we do.
I never needed to be the hardest motherfucker in the world. That became a goal because I knew it would bring out my best self. Which is what this fucked-up world needs from all of us: to evolve into the very best versions of ourselves. That’s a moving target, and it isn’t a one-time task. It is a lifelong quest for more knowledge, more courage, more humility, and more belief. Because when you summon the strength and discipline to live like that, the only thing limiting your horizons is you.