The Resilient Mind - Do The Impossible - David Goggins

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

An accomplished endurance athlete, Goggins has completed over 60 ultra-marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, setting new course records and regularly placing in the top five. He once held the Guinness World Record for pull-ups completing 4,030 in 17 hours, and he’s a sought after public speaker.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Do the Impossible with David Guggins. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. I had to stop thinking normal. I had to stop thinking normal. I can no longer be a common man walking around doing common things. But no one taught me this stuff.

It wasn't like I had, you know, I paid a trainer to come train me. Jenny Craig didn't come down a miracle on my ass. None of this happened. It was on me. And that's what you have to realize. Everything you do, you may have some support. You may not, but it's on you. You have to make the decision whether you want to be a badass

or whether you just want to be mediocre and everything's okay. But being a badass hurts real bad. And that's why I didn't want to do it. So over the next two and a half months, I won't bore you know, bore with details. I lost the weight. I went back to the recruiter, and I went to Buds, Navy Steel Training, and I was the only person in the history of Navy Steel Training

to go through three Hell Weeks in one year. Hell Week is 130 hours of continuous training. And starts on Sunday, it is on Friday. You might get two hours of sleep. And I did all that in one year. Why did that in one year? Cut to the chase again. There was an old crusty commanding officer named Captain Bowen.

Captain Bone was old Vietnam vet. This is his last tour of duty. And he believed, so over 70 years, this train has been going on. He believed, no matter where you were at, you will start from day one if you don't make it through. So I get to Wednesday, ruptured hernia, back to day one, week one. Get to my second hell week, I get through that hell week, get ready to start second phase, break my kneecap. Roll back day one, week one. In my third hell week, I'm standing there.

I have 16 stress fractures. So I have 16 stretch fractures. This is me and my first hill week, I believe. So I have 16 stretch fractures. I'm on my crutches. I'm looking at him. And he says, Gagans, this is your last time you're going through training.

You have four classes to get better. So I got hurt in May, had to come back in January from a broken kneecap, all kind of crap. Stress fractures totally jacked up. So how I did it, I actually came back. Stress fractures don't heal.

really well. So I got through my third hell week at my third class, and in that hell week, we had a guy die of pulmonary deema. It was one of the coldest hell weeks on the planet. So what hell week is, is they freeze your butt off, and usually you get done freezing, and they try to warm you up. In this particular hell week, it just continued and continued to rain. So we never got warm. He ended up dying Wednesday night of pulmonary deema. So when I got through with hell week, my stress fractures were so bad, and I realized I can't go through trash. I need to get rolled again. I'm broken.

And he's like, no more rolls. And I remember that. So at this hell week, I said to myself, man, I can't even walk. I was on crutches again, but after hell week, you get walk week. And after walk week, you have 20 more weeks of getting your butt kicked. So I had a plan. My plan was to show up at 3.30 in the morning, put my black sock on, go on my dive cage, and get duct tape.

and I would literally cast my feet up to the mid and my calf. And for the first 40 minutes of the run, that it would, I have a pressure, so I still have them now, pressure ulcers that are now healed up, but you can see the scars from the flexion of the joint. So basically how, so what I did was I pretty much cast my ankle up my shin so I wasn't doing this and activating those stress fractures. So I ran on my hip flexors.

For the first 45 minutes, the pain was so as very, but then after that it would subside and I would be able to finish the day out the pain would come back so I get them with still training I gained the weight back on about 250 pounds and have you guys heard of the story low and survivor Marcus Attrell is a great friend of mine we speak on the Patriot tour together I went through Bud's training with Danny Deese Michael Murphy Axe and also Marcus Atrelle Marcus was the only guy that lived on this operation. It went bad. QRF team came in, Quick Reaction Force team came in of Navy SEALs. They got blown up.

Everybody died, but Marcus Attrell. I was at Freefall School with his twin brother, Morgan Atrelle, who's also a Navy SEAL. Heard about it, went home, Googled ways to raise money, Googled races, all this other stuff. But came up at 250, hadn't put running shoes on an over a year, was a race called the Badwater 135. Where you run 135, where you run 135, miles in one day, pretty much 48 hours, and it's in Death Valley in summertime. I didn't know anything about this crazy world. I thought it was a stage race.

I thought he ran like 10, 15 miles, camped out, barbecued, and then ran again. So I called the race director up, Chris Costman. I said, hey, man, I want to do this race to raise money. He said, have you ran 100 miles before? I said, what, in the calendar year? He said, no, in one day. I call him up on a Wednesday, and he says, you only have two more races to qualify for my bad water race, and basically you have to run 100 miles in 24 hours.

The race right there in San Diego that Saturday was called a San Diego one day, where you run around a one-mile track for 24 hours. Haven't run in basically a year, I said, hey, I'm going to do it. I'm a Navy SEAL. Bad idea. Go to Walmart, get a blue lawn chair, rich cracker, mileplex, and that's my nutrition people for 100 miles. Pretty stupid, right?

I have my ex-wife out there with me. She's crewing me. I get to mile 70. We can get to mile 70, and you have it run past 20 miles in your life, and you sit down for the first time. What do you think happens? Pretty jacked up, right? Yeah.

Well, I'm looking at three of my ex-wife, and I'm sitting there. She's looking at me. I'm looking at her. and I said, I'm kind of making it very abbreviated. In the book, it's a lot more than this, but I'm abbreviated it real quick. I asked her, she loved me. She said, yes, why? I said, I'm going to take a shit on myself right now.

Because I couldn't stand up because my blood pressure was all messed up. Start peeing blood down my leg. She's a nurse, so she's freaking out. And there's one thing a black man never wants to hear, ever. She said you're starting to turn white. So this is where the 40% rule comes in, people. Worst shape my entire life. I've been through Ranger School, Delta Force election twice, three hell weeks, all this crap.

This is the worst pain I've ever been in, to this day, I'm 43 years old right now, to 21 years in the military, I've done 60 ultra races, pull-up records, all kind of stuff. This is the worst pain of my entire life to this day. But this is what I had to realize, one thing. I had to break this humongous thing down to very small. All I put in my mind was, let's not quit yet. I'm going to quit, but not yet. So I sat there, I can't stand up, so let's get some nutrition.

All right, I'm not dizzy anymore. Let me clean this crap off me, okay? I need some food. I'm going to quit after I eat the peanut burn and jelly sandwich. All right, but not yet. Let me see if I can stand up. Stand up, maybe I'll quit. Let me see if I can walk to the car.

There's the car. It's a one mile track. I walk past the car. I'm just going to get back to the chair. I'm not going to quit yet. I kept this mindset the whole time. I ended up doing 30 more miles. Did 31 miles, truly, after that.

I did 101 miles and 19 hours. If you're driving a car, the car may say 130 miles an hour. The factory puts a governor on it, so you only go 91. So you're sitting there when to race somebody. They have no governor. They're fine. Boom. You can't.

Because every time you get to 91, the car starts doing this. Starts doing this. We put a governor on our brain, and the second we get to that governor, our body start doing this. Oh, this sucks. This is uncomfortable. No, no, no, no, no.

Let's go this way. Let's stop. It starts giving you all these questions that we cannot answer. If you can't answer the questions, your brain's asking you, you quit. If you have the answers to those questions of why the hell am I out here

and you give it a quick answer, the brain starts shutting up because it knows why we're doing what we're doing. I started figuring these things out in my life. So we have this governor on our brain and how you start pushing past that governor start realizing your brain has the tactical advantage over you. Why? Because it knows your insecurities. It knows your line. It knows your fears. It knows everything about you. Whenever those things start like right now, I'm scared to death up here. Why? When I was in sixth grade, I was in the play. And I stood up in

a whole bunch of white people that probably didn't, you know, I was being judged in my mind, scared the shit out of me. And I stuttered severely bad. I knew I stuttered bad. My line was this long. It was like, hello or some shit. And I stood up for everybody, and I was like this. And I walked off stage. So when I walk up in front of 1,200 people, it's still there. My mind's telling me, go, run off the stage. I have to tell my mind something different. I had to remember my resume, what I've been through, that all of you in here are just as fucked up as me. We post our real life, never on Instagram. We post a life that we want to have out there.

That's not me anymore. I'm going to tell you exactly about me. Who I am, that's how you get better. That's how you fix yourself. That's how you grow. I'm going to move on real quick to the very end of my story. I could be up here for a long time, but I need some questions. I did everything I talked about up here.

I ran 205 miles. I ran 7,000 miles in 2007 to raise $2 million for Special Operations Warrior Foundation. Thank you. I did it all with a hole in my heart, the size of a dime. So basically, I was sick as hell, and I didn't get into all of this. Once again, all these stories in my book with all these takeaways that I have that, you know, I'm not a theorist, people. There's a bunch of people who are theorists who go to the library and study the mind.

They study it in a book. I studied it by being a practitioner. I put my mind in hell and I realized how it was thinking. And I figured out tools and tactics on how to get through it by being in it, not by studying it, by being in it. And literally that's how I started callousing over. You know how, so I did, what, I did 67,000 pull-ups in nine months and it calloused my hands. It calloused my hands real good to protect my hands against the bar. I started learning how to callous my mind, it calloused over my victim's mentality.

And that's what I did. I did. So back to the hole in my heart. Everything I talked about, three hell weeks, range of school, running, swimming, I did triple iron man, it did all kind of crap. And when I got to about 33, 34 years old, I started being extremely sick. When you have an ASD, and so ASD is atrial deceptive defect. A lot of us are born with a hole in our heart when we get to a certain age, it closes. Mine was very large. So basically, the good blood would give with the back. And so, blood so the oxygenated blood would be deoxinated and I was so the bad blood was going through my body long story short and that's how I was doing everything and so they

sent me to John Hopkins everybody studied my body they studied everything and one guy says you know what we can't find anything on how you did all this how are you able to do all this a head guy came in from MIT and he said know how he did it understand something people we are leaving a lot on the My book is called Can't Hurt Me. Why is it called Can't Hurt Me? Life isn't fair. We have to understand that.

It shouldn't be fair. It's a trial grounds, a testing ground. It's built to make us harder. It's built to make us as strong as we can to test us, to drive us. So, mentality is the only thing that gets us through life. I was an underdog. We are all underdogs in life. Even the baddest person in the world should think that way.

So you should always have, never arrived mentality. And the can't hurt me mentality is no matter where you come from, the sewer or wherever you think you're from, when I got out of the sewer, I got to the road and looked around and said, can't hurt me. Nothing should be able to hurt you. If you believe that, it starts to become true. It was honestly, I started shaving my head at a young age, and I lied so much because I wanted everybody to like me. I wanted to be accepted so badly. So whatever you liked, I liked. I liked it, but just so you liked me, that's what I thought about.

So for a period of time, looking in that mirror every day, you can't lie to yourself, man, that dirty bathroom mirror with all that, daggone toothpaste, gum, and whatever on it, it's telling you the truth. It's saying, hey, man, you are a jacked up cat. And a lot of us have this voice in our head. We all know that voice in our head that tells us the truth every single day that we try to run away from that says we're scared of this, let's go this way. It started gnawing at me so horribly bad.

that it wouldn't allow me to live anymore without facing me. I had to go back in the dungeon. So when I tell my story, I tell it on the very surface level. I had to go down in the dungeon, the sewer where my mind used to be at and talk to that guy. Because I wanted to live my life in a way that when I died, I was proud of myself. I know what pride felt like. and if it took pushing myself to death, I was willing to do that. But I want to look in that mirror, not impress anybody, not money, not fame, not nothing.

I wanted to impress the guy in the daggone mirror. And I worked endlessly and tirelessly to do that. And it happened. Well, we'll do leadership first. Leadership is being very uncomfortable all the time. It is holding yourself to such a standard that is almost untouchable. You may not have any friends. You may have a jacked-up life, maybe you have a jacked-up marriage.

It's being unbalanced. You've literally dedicated your life to a higher cause, a higher purpose beyond you. And it takes that person in your life to understand your mission. And it's totally mission-oriented. It's that guy that's like, okay, let's say we're going to work out at 5 o'clock. And I'm in charge. I'm the leader. My guys and my girls, wherever it may be, need to see me run into work at 3.30.

I need to take every excuse that they may have away from them. They need to see me outworking them every day. Not trying to put them down, but saying, God, man, if he's doing this, man. So when I tell you to do something, you can't say no. You realize, fuck, he's getting after it every day. I cannot say no to him. He's leading by example. So that's what it's all about.

And people say lead by example. It's so easy to say that, man. It's so easy to say that. but to do that every day, to wake up every day, miserable and say, God, I don't want to do this anymore. That's when you know you're a leader. When you're at that point and you're saying yourself, every night, it's Groundhog's Day. Every single day, you know, I'm going back in the lab again, man. I'm going back in the lab every single day, you know it's not going to end.

That's when you know you're being a leader when your life truly is in a, it sucks. It's just truth, man. Being a leader is horrible. I love scoring the touchdowns, man, but no one wants to be a lineman. Right. They get praise for me scoring a touchdowns. That, you know, that lineman is doing all the work. Is you have to believe that you are here on this earth.

So what changed my whole mindset, really? I was thinking, like, why the hell did God put me here? What am I doing here? If you have that mentality, you could be nothing. You have to believe that you are here for a reason. That there's some reason. Me getting beat up, me getting tortured, me being. bullied, me being more than no foundation, me having to figure all this shit out of my own,

figuring out this indestructible mental toolbox, had it be for a reason. And my reason, I believe now, I know for a fact, was to unlock the code of human potential. And for me to share that with people. But this is the thing, though. It's easier said than done. On the other end of suffering is a life that many. people don't know even exist. It's a beautiful world because like the 40% rule. We all live in this world where our brains are keeping us in this box. Outside that box, on the other edge of suffering,

which is all the only is that 40% is a world that's endless of opportunity. But we are afraid to go outside that box because in that box is comfortable. That's where all of our nice stuff, you know, that's where the nice four-lane highways at. I know. I know. where the restrooms are at. I know where the gas stations are at. Outside that box, man, God gives you a shovel and says, man, start digging. That's not fun. But when you dig, you dig your own path to all kinds of stuff that's unknown. And that's why I started realizing, man, on the other end of this is some beautiful stuff. So I got outside my box and realized, man, 300 pounds, now look at me, I'm a hundred and 85 pounds. And on the other side of the box was all this stuff.

And I know it was over there, so I climbed the wall and saw it. So what wall are you climbing now? Man, right now, I've climbed a lot of walls. There's no more walls anymore. The reason why is because I know how to climb. I was trying to figure out how to climb before. I got all the right gear, man. I got the ropes.

I got the shoes. I got the chalk. I got the harnesses. I'm good. I'm not scared to climb anymore. I go to the rock, hammered in. I got my blade, and I'm good to go. So you've got to figure out how to climb first,

and that's all. We all have a different way of climbing. I said there's a lot of books out there on mental toughness. It's all crap. Why? Because it's a cookie cutter way. Life isn't cookie cutter. Like 3.14 is pie.

It's how you figure out equations. We're all different equations. We all come from, we all have a story. We all have to strengthen our mind to figure out our own equation. Once you figure out your own equation in life, you can then start picking away at how to be better. But you first have to figure out your equation in life. Once you figure that out, man, you can do anything.

Thank you for tuning into this episode. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.