The Resilient Mind - Why You Hate Me: David Goggins’ Quotes That Expose Your Excuses

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

[Explicit]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 Why You Hate Me, David Gagin's quotes that expose your excuses. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. But guess what happens? That alarm clock goes off at 4 a.m. to train. Yeah. I want to be a seal today.

I don't want to be whatever today. I'll start tomorrow. You hate me because you're probably in the bed right now. you're probably an underachiever. You're probably somebody who doesn't want to do anything with your life. So I make you question everything about yourself. One thing I did wrong in my life was I tried for so many years to please people. And I did it at the expense of myself.

I was leaving a lot in the tank. And when you do that, you stop living. And you will live exactly. either way you live now, questioning who you are, wondering what is possible, wondering what you are capable of doing. That's how that looks. Or you can be me which, am I happy?

I don't know. Never thought about it. Don't really care about it. Because all I really cared about was when I looked in that fucking mirror, I saw a piece of shit. Happiness wasn't on the mirror at 16. Or I was doing Japan. It wasn't like, oh, my, I'm looking for happiness.

No, I'm looking to look at myself in the mirror. I said, all right, motherfucker, he did again today. 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 my ass.

None of this happened. It was on me. I became obsessed. I became obsessed with being the baddest motherfucker that God ever created. Am I that? I don't care. I believe it. And I was trying to tell him once you become obsessed with something. Obsessed. It's okay to be unbalanced for a while. It's okay. Don't be all this stuff. People say, you've got to be balanced. To be the best in the world at what you do. It's not about being a Navy SEAL, people. The best at what you do, you have to be unbalanced to find every bit of fucking energy and strength that you have to pull it off. I don't look at anything as failure

because when you're willing to try to do something, not trying is failure that's, and that's not some after school special shit, but when you're able to go out there, there's no failure. It's attempts. Because when you're trying to do something that's bigger than you, whatever you are, whoever you are, if you're paralyzed,

you're trying to walk one step and you didn't. You didn't fail, motherfucker. That was your first attempt. If that's your biggest thing, that's how your mindset needs to go into everything. So I don't look at it. at it as failure is a big word that gets people down and shit. We give so much power to words. I don't.

No one's a miracle me to be somebody special. Everybody that called me nigger, my dad my mom, all my situations were on me now. It's solely on me. In 2013 people wanted me to write my book. I did it in 2018. It took five years.

And the reason why I didn't do it, I set at a table and Jennifer was there this before I actually start working for me I started dating or whatever and all these people are there and they're like man you got to go on social media and I was like fuck are you man like I'm not that's it's poison

it's poison because I knew what I did to get where I am and I'm going to have these people these normal everyday people fat lazy is exactly who I was judging me because I know it because I was

wants them. Failure is the ultimate thing, man. I feel so many times before. That's why I don't look at failure anymore as failure. I look at my first, second, third attempt. To be at the point of your life where you don't care about being judged, you can be in a room of a million people and they all hate you, and you walk in and you go like this. Because, not because you're angry at them, because you know yourself, inside and out, and you know that you've put yourself to hell to be where you're at today. You've walked a walk. You've talked to talk and you've walked to walk.

And that's to me what it's all about. 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. A good painter will not just paint. He needs to create.

And you can't create the phones and everything going around you. So you've got to block yourself off. You only do two podcasts in a year. You block yourself off and you're painting this thing inside and you're going through all these different colors of paint and everything else. And you can only figure out the right painting

if you spend the correct amount of time in your brain. You have to face that in that dark room. In that dark room is who you are. But in that dark room is where you have to create another human being that walks out of that dark room to face who you are. That's the only way you're going to get over all those things. So basically, a lot of us aren't prepared for life.

We get up willy-nilly, and his hope life is going to happen. It is going to happen. But it's going to happen with the prepared mind or unprepared mind. Most people attack life with the unprepared mind. What I do is I try to account for all things that could happen, might happen, probably will happen, and then the unknowns. Whenever you think you can't. Confidence comes from the thing that you built.

You must build belief. You must build confidence. It can be like, hey, I'm going to knock that shit out. You got to look over here and say, I can knock that shit out. It's a belief and it's built on what you put in to yourself. I had to miserably wake up every morning in the cold because it was Indiana, November when it started. I was miserable.

This is your new life. Take it or leave it. There's no happiness about it. There's no peace behind it. It sucks. You've got to live with that. I lived with it for a lot of years. And so I sat back and said, okay, all right,

I know what this takes. And when you sit back as fucked up as I was And I had a laundry list, a table like this of what I have to do to become just a human being. I understand that guy. I understand exactly where you're coming from. That is your personal opinion. And I totally get that. But there's very few people in this world who want to do a job like that.

And it takes a different kind of mindset. Is it teard grass appropriate? I don't know. how hard that training is, I don't expect anybody to understand it, but 1%. But the loud voices of this world are the 99%

who don't understand exactly what you have to do. I became the most obsessed person on the planet of Earth. Now, it was basically, I had to invent a guy that didn't exist. I lived in life so disciplined that everybody that I want, look to these fake characters

I built that as a man and when I was younger I had this image in my mind of what does a man look like to me and I got all these people who are badass characters and in my mind

I became that I don't quit you know I may not make it the first time but I'll come back I got a conaudible I got a fucking I got a fucking get my head back in the game. I got to figure this shit out.

It doesn't mean you leave. It means you study it more. When do you rest? When do you recover? And I don't want to scare people. But the truth answer is, I don't take any days off. That I turned a person this fucked up into this motherfucker right here.

Not off of reading a fucking book off of theory. off of going to work on myself and saying, I don't know how to do this, but I know that to get over there that fucking side, I got to grind myself into a fucking fine power. And I did it. If you want to be great, you want to be the best motherfucker ever at which you do,

you can be misunderstood by everybody because you're going to be so fucking obsessed and so driven to get there. That's what it takes. It takes every second of your fucking life. Anybody says balance? Yeah, balance is important for a lot of fucking people. It is.

But if you want to fucking go to that edge where people do not like you, don't understand you, question everything you fucking do, you've arrived. You just can't read about it. You can't sit back and be a theorist. You have to be a fucking practitioner. At the day, I asked myself one question.

Can I take one more step? And usually the answer is yes. So if you can answer that question and not take another step, that is real failure. That is real quitting. So a lot of people can take one more step, but they choose not to. I don't know if you can take two steps. You got to answer that question after you take the first step. But I can always take one more steps.

If I choose not to, that's on me. I got to live with that. Are you happy? What's wrong with you? I'm driven. I'm obsessed. And that's what you see. Failure is the ultimate thing, man.

I feel so many times before that's why I don't look at failure anymore as failure I look at my first, second, third attempt. How are you going to feel, man, when you accomplished this goal coming from that shit? Coming from the fucking hell you came from. A lot of people start

from a good starting point. They have a good foundation. What if you can surpass all of these motherfuckers? Everybody who was fucking way up here started up here. And you had, you started with no legs. He had to grow fucking legs. to you start walking and then crawling and then running

and then you start passing people and all this giving to them I had to use all this negative shit that was making me weak and horrible as a person I had to use this as the power that now fueled me had to flip it on its head and say hold up this might be exactly what I need for me I made decision and my decision was to be the best person I could

and I basically a lot of mornings I wake up and say fuck your feelings and that doesn't mean like you know don't take it literally fuck your feelings but sometimes you have to go beyond

what you're feeling and my knees were fucked but guess what I wanted to run I have to change because I can't stay here I can't I look myself in real and I was defeated

I go look at myself I'm like who am I so I know why you go on Instagram I know why you because you just have the time. You have the time because you don't want to put that time

into bettering oneself. I had two options to either be that 300-pound guy who sprayed for cockroaches and made $1,000 a month and at 24 years old, knowing when I'm 50 fucking years old I can reflect on this

and think about what guy I never became or I can totally just sack it up and fail and fail and fail entire succeed. Let me teach you the real life how it really is. The reason why you're a loser and the reason why you're not fucking making it and the reason why you're trying to go to all these, I go to all these fucking conventions, speak all the fucking time. I look in the fucking audience and these people sign up, sign up, sign up, fucking every year go to convention, thinking they're going to learn something fucking different. No, you're lazy. You know exactly what to do,

exactly what to do. Because even me, in my state of, I can't read or write, I knew exactly what to do. It just sucks doing it. It sucks to do it. It sucks to wake up every morning of your life and say, God, man, I'm not smart. So guess what I got to do?

I got to study the same shit that I get one of the highest scores in the nation on. And do it again. Do it again. Do it again. It's not just there. It's not just there permanently. 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're fucked. 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 got to control it.

If not, it's over. But you're also the scientist. You create your own self. Most people are missing something because there's so much trapped in there. I don't even want to say potential. I think that's word is used out too much too. There's so much in you that God or wherever the hell you believe in, or if you're an atheist, in you, that you have not unlocked,

that you walk around with this gorgeous wife or a great husband, all this money. You're like, God, I'm like, I'm missing. and something. Yeah, because it's about 75% of you is still fucking in there. Still chained up because you just didn't want to find your will problem. Didn't want to find your soul, your will, your heart, your determination, your guts, your courage. Because I'm looking for that person like me. I sat down at the table and I said to myself, what are you

willing to give up? Everything. And when people come to me, with that kind of mindset, I can work with you. When you are willing to strip yourself down to nothing and give everything, that's who I want to work with. Because now I can mold you into exactly who you want to be. When you put these restrictions up, that's why my first question is, how bad do you want this? If it's as bad as you want to live or breathe or sleep, whatever hell it may be, I can work with you. So you put it to figure out of that. out who the fuck you are on this journey.

And those few people who don't, many people don't like you, so be it. But you first had to figure out you because a lot of people die with a lot of untapped potential because you're trying to be somebody that they're not. So I was able to figure out my own potential by figuring out me. The mind controls everything.

So what I realized was that, when I was growing up and I was 300 pounds and I got all fat and I got all insecure, I realized that my mind kept taking me in this direction. When things got uncomfortable for me, when I was facing my insecurities, I was facing my fears. My mind said, oh, no, we have the tactical advantage. We need to get you, separate you from this feeling. This feeling over your life is all about feelings.

We want the happy feeling. We don't want that feeling of this sucks. Why am I here? And you don't have any, so you can't answer those questions, so you leave. I started realizing that if in that moment you can answer those fucked up questions and you are now in charge of your brain

versus your brain ruling you, that's where all that stuff comes from. So the 40% rule is all of that. You get to 40% your brain says, we're done. Let's roll, man. This is starting to get painful. This is uncomfortable.

So you sit down. You have to figure out ways and everybody's different. That's how the book kind of talks about Like we all have these things about, you know, five steps to this and four steps to this. It's a lot more than that. That's all bullshit. It's a practice that you have to, it's a habit.

So if you know that at 40%, I'm feeling pain. At 40% I'm feeling pain, that's where the 40% will kicks in. Now it starts. Okay, I'm feeling pain. My mind saying all this shit to me. It's saying, get out of here, run, flee. The fighter flight kicks in. Okay, we're done.

we're not good enough. It starts telling you all these things. You start to believe it because the mind controls all. This is the time where you have to gain control back of your mind. It's okay, let me see if I can go 45%. And once you start giving yourself more and more hope, and start realizing, okay, the mind starts to be, okay, what are you doing? We're supposed to be going right and you're going left. You start then controlling your mind, start finding more in, you know, in yourself. And then it goes from 40% to you know, a lot further than that. But that's the start of it though. Get to the spot where your mind is saying stop. Wherever that is, you got to get there first, and then that's when that shit starts

to work for you. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.