The Resilient Mind - Never Give Up - David Goggins

Episode Date: August 23, 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 Never Give Up with David Gagins. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. When you quit, your mind says, we're done. So it doesn't expand. There's no expansion when you quit. When you say, uh-uh, this sucks, I'm drowning, I'm miserable, I'm suffering, I'm broken,

but I'm not going anywhere. What happens to your mind, it says, not leaving. So we got to expand. We got to grow. We got to figure this thing out. So then these compartments in your brain, they have to work. And then you start to engage parts of your mind that you never engaged before when you're in suffer mode and you say, I'm not going to quit. You're forcing your brain now to operate on a level. It's not used to you. But then it becomes used to. The only way anything gets accomplished, you got to work hard. I can't remember what's in this paragraph to pass this test to get in the military. Read again. So not getting it. Read again.

Wait, if not getting it, write it out. And guess what happened? I got it. I can't swim. I'm negative buoyant. Go back again. Go back again. Go back again. Go back again. I got it. I realize if I keep going back and going back and going back, your mind was safe. Okay, we're going to figure it out because he is not going to stop. The mind always has the tactical advantage over you. Why is that? It knows your fears. It knows your insecurities. It knows where they're hiding. We count on people too much to get us through shit. And we look to our right, we look to our left, we're looking for help. And if you can build that self, you can build that total accountability in one self. And it's not about being selfish. I'm trying to create a better me. So hopefully,

people who are hearing this are taking it the right way can say, I can run a mile. Ain't about running 205 miles. It doesn't matter. I want you to see how far you can go. The biggest trophy I own now is that book. The biggest trophy I own now is not the book itself, it's what's in the book. It's what, like, I don't give a fuck if that sells one copy. Honest to God, man, what I did, and that's what I hope people understand, your life in the journey

you put yourself through, there's nothing more than that. And that's all I want people to do is realize that you have to struggle. You have to struggle. The bigger the struggle, the bigger the peace. The bigger the suffering, the more peace. So a lot of this isn't your fault why you do some things you do, why you feel the way you feel. But no one's coming back to save your ass. You have to go back to where it started, wherever that place is for everybody.

It has the courage to go back there and start fixing what broke you. And that's, and that's my, I was like, hey, I'm f***ed up. I'm going to go back and fix this stuff. And I know how to self-motivate. A lot of my, don't know how to self-motivate, man. Like, we like to put the headphones on, like before the big game and listen to the music. What the stuff did you do when the headphones come off, bro? There's you and your own mind.

I know how to do that. That's the hard part, man. Do you ever listen to music when you run? Never. I wanted you to go home that night after you put the living shit out of me, and I smiled in your face. I wanted you to feel worse than I. did and you were going home to a nice warm bed and I was still out there in the grit suffering for another

hundred hours. I wanted you to think about me knowing that I'm comfortable being very unfeckin comfortable and I want you to think about when you went through I'm afraid of this I'm here life made me this way here I stutter I have these issues with with reading and writing and I'm fat and I'm insecure we can't live like this we can't live in fear we can't live in judgment We can't be afraid of what people right now are looking at me saying about me. We cannot be afraid of that. My reading, I'm learning my workouts, my diet. You start neglecting all of that.

You neglect one of them. You can neglect all of them a long time. It's going to haunt you. When you start seeing that, my God, I haven't eaten my long time, haven't been asleep in a long time. It can only be one of those things to take you off. I'm very aware of my eating. eating, my sleeping. And I started to get too far away from them.

It's a hard stop. The only thing that gets you mad nowadays is that so many people die with untapped potential because they think that someone else has been better than them. And they were born not with the greatest tools. You need the ability to grind your ass into a fine powder.

And when you're in that fine powder, find a way to build that motherfucker back up repeatedly. And that's possible. The one thing that made me who I'm the day is being vulnerable. It's breaking myself down to the absolute rock bottom and being able to tell people who I am. And that's how I fixed it. Literally, look somebody in the eyes. You know what, man?

I have a whole bunch of character problems, character flaws. I've lied about this. I've cheated here. I'm insecure here. This isn't the real me. I lied to you about that. I wanted your acceptance in life. All those things happen.

but the thing about it is that we get judged so quickly by who we are. We don't know. We don't go to where it happened. Life created this person, me. And I had to realize, man, that's okay, man. It's not my fault. Now I'm going to go back and fix it, though. So a lot of this isn't your fault why you do some things you do,

why you feel the way you feel. But no one's coming back to save your ass. You have to go back to where they started. Wherever that place is for everybody, and had the courage to go back there and start fixing what broke you. It's not addictive at all because you don't want to live there, but it's definitely a place that makes you look at people very differently. Because once you see if I was born with a silver spoon

and everything was given to me and life came easy, but knowing where I came from and where I'm at now just because I was able to crack open a few more doors, That's what's disappointing for me for other people. You know, so it's not that I want to live there, I know I can go there. And once again, I know other people can go there. So I guess that's the thing with me is I know I have the ability now to go to a place that's very, very hyper-focused

that I can accomplish some pretty amazing feats, not because I'm amazing, because I allow my mind to be open-minded for the possibilities of what can I achieve. takes the growth in your mental aspect and your spiritual, everything grows because you start feeling better about yourself. Not many things on the planet make you feel good about yourself

like getting after it, doing something that challenges you mentally and physically every day. You cannot live in that normal mindset. You must be your best on your worst day. And how you do that is you cannot think of a normal mindset. You cannot have a normal mindset.

If you're constantly taking the easy way out, you never go call it your mind. I was a chameleon living in life who could barely get by. So I know that they were taking the normal mindset of people. They weren't talking about the one percenters, the people who want it like there's no tomorrow. You're alone. You're alone. You may have a shrink you're going to. You may have a best friend you're going to.

But there's 24 hours in the day where you're alone in this brain. and your brain is talking to you in all kind of ways and it wants to control you and pull you in these different pockets. If you can't control your own brain and your brain controls you, you've got to tell your brain where you want to go and how you want to go and how you want to get there.

You've got to control it. If not, it's over. Guess what happens? That long clock goes off at 4 a.m. to train. I don't want to be a seal today. I don't want to be whatever today. I'll start tomorrow. And that's the usual pattern of people's lives.

That's why I talk about clearing out the mind. Until you really want to do something, you always get to be a talker. You always get run. So I had a hard time learning growing up that I was very smart when it came to human beings. A genius. Because I lived in such hell, I was always studying people. Who can I trust? Who can I not trust?

energy. I got really good with energy. Can I, is this person's energy good? Is it bad? So I became a genius on human beings. So I studied people all the time. Studied all the time. It was the only way for me to move forward. So like a lot of times, if your back is hurting, it may not be your back. It may be something else in your bias making your back hurt. For me, I'm like, man, why can I get past this hurdle?

So like I said, I'm always examining myself every day. What is it? What is it? Well, there's only one thing you haven't examined yet. And it's going back to the beast, going back to the demon. So when I went back to him, I realized that that was the unsolved mystery. Was I had to look that man the eye one more time. Like how I studied that Navy SEAL talking shit in lion,

I got it from this part right here in the book. I went and I didn't see him anymore as this beast. I started doing research on him, found out that his dad used to beat him really bad. His dad would put him in front of a furnace, open the furnace up with the flames coming out, and put him right in front of it, have him bare butt naked,

and he would whip the shit out of him. And the whole idea of that is if you move, you're going to get burned. So stay right here and take beating. So what happened with him, those demons from his father went to my father, and he tried to transfer him over to me. I had to understand who my father was, understand where he came from, understand why were you so brutal to us.

I got my answers. Took those answers. It made myself better from the answers about him. And so that's why it was necessary for me to go back. I was looking for an apology so then maybe I could just go be a loser and understand that you f*** me up. Why would the apology make you a loser? It would make, no, it would make me feel vindicated.

Justified. Yes. Like, man, you did this to me. I can go be a loser now. My failings are okay. This okay. Because you did this. So I was looking for that.

And when I went there, I realized, because this voice in him was saying, it's not your dad's fault. And I'm like, nah, man. Because this voice over here always said, it's your dad's fault. This other voice started tuning in, was loud, started getting louder. The more I drove to Buffalo was saying, you get to face a lot of this young man.

You got a long journey ahead of you because you're going to find out that while your dad did a lot of shit to you, you're going to have to make it on your own. And the voice got louder and louder and louder. And by the time I got to that door and my time I was leaving that house instead of me feeling sorry for myself

I started to do in live autopsy a lot of people when you die they figure out why you die and figure out how you die in the autopsy but we never do a live autopsy to figure out why we're dying

while we are alive and I was dying I was living every day but I was really dead and so I figured it out and once I figured it out I was able to be reborn. I was able to be reborn. And break down situations very quickly within some trauma in your life,

some devastation in your life, because it's going to come. The devastation, the trauma is going to come, and you can't allow that to become a Jersey barrier. It can't be a Jersey barrier. It has to be something that you can maneuver through very quickly and move forward. That takes a lot of toughness. You don't find yourself in over here. You find yourself on the other end,

Like the 100 mile race all was on, I ran it for 24 hours, I found myself on the other end. I'm the hardest working guy that doesn't talk about. So basically, I don't take any days off as far as working out. First thing in the morning time is you have to build your confidence. And every day you're constantly gaining and losing confidence. You're never staying the same. So how you build your confidence is if you like what you see in that mirror, That's how you start your day off.

If you wake up and you look fat, you look out of shape, you're not, feel good, which is, you know, or you don't feel good inside. So my whole big thing is get up and work out, shed some calories, get the adrenals going, get the mind going, get all that going. Every day I run. Every day I work out. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.