“Life is one long motherf*cking imaginary game that has no scoreboard, no referee, and isn’t over until we’re dead and buried. And all I’d ever wanted from it was to become successful in my own eyes. That didn’t mean wealth or celebrity, a garage full of hot cars, or a harem of beautiful women trailing after me. It meant becoming the hardest motherf*cker who ever lived. Sure, I stacked up some failures along the way, but in my mind the record proved that I was close. Only the game wasn’t over, and being hard came with the requirement to drain every drop of ability from my mind, body, and soul before the whistle blew. I would remain in constant pursuit. I wouldn’t leave anything on the table. I wanted to earn my final resting place.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
Archives
“Even if you’re surrounded by positive people, they will have ideas about who you are, what you’re good at, and how you should focus your energy. That sh*t is just human nature, and if you try to break out of their box you’ll get some unsolicited advice that has a way of smothering your aspirations if you let it. Often our people don’t mean any harm. Nobody who cares about us actually wants us to get hurt. They want us to be safe, comfortable, and happy, and not to have to stare at the floor in a dungeon sifting through shards of our broken dreams. Too bad. There’s a lot of potential in those moments of pain. And if you figure out how to piece that picture back together, you’ll find a hell of a lot of power there too!” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“We are all guilty of allowing so-called experts, or just people who have more experience in a given field than we do, to cap our potential. One of the reasons we love sports is because we also love watching those glass ceilings get shattered. If I was going to be the next athlete to smash popular perception, I’d need to stop listening to doubt, whether it streamed in from the outside or bubbled up from within, and the best way to do that was to decide that the pull-up record was already mine. I didn’t know when it would officially become mine. It might be in two months or twenty years, but once I decided it belonged to me and decoupled it from the calendar, I was filled with confidence and relieved of any and all pressure because my task morphed from trying to achieve the impossible into working toward an inevitability.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“It doesn’t always go your way, so you can’t get trapped in this idea that just because you’ve imagined a possibility for yourself that you somehow deserve it. Your entitled mind is dead weight. Cut it loose. Don’t focus on what you deserve. Take aim on what you are willing to earn!” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“Most wars are won or lost in our own heads, and when we’re in a foxhole we usually aren’t alone, and we need to be confident in the quality of the heart, mind, and dialogue of the person hunkered down with us. Because at some point we will need some empowering words to keep us focused and deadly.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“We are all fighting the same battle. All of us are torn between comfort and performance, between settling for mediocrity or being willing to suffer in order to become our best self, all the damn time. We make those kinds of decisions a dozen or more times each day.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“Are you an experienced scuba diver? Great, shed your gear, take a deep breath and become a one-hundred-foot free diver. Are you a badass triathlete? Cool, learn how to rock climb. Are you enjoying a wildly successful career? Wonderful, learn a new language or skill. Get a second degree. Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb f*ck in the classroom again, because that is the only way to expand your body of knowledge and body of work. It’s the only way to expand your mind.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“Starting at zero is a mindset that says my refrigerator is never full, and it never will be. We can always become stronger and more agile, mentally and physically. We can always become more capable and more reliable. Since that’s the case we should never feel that our work is done. There is always more to do.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“No matter what you or I achieve, in sports, business, or life, we can’t be satisfied. Life is too dynamic a game. We’re either getting better or we’re getting worse. Yes, we need to celebrate our victories. There’s power in victory that’s transformative, but after our celebration we should dial it down, dream up new training regimens, new goals, and start at zero the very next day. I wake up every day as if I am back in BUD/S, day one, week one.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“The sole reason I work out like I do isn’t to prepare for and win ultra races. I don’t have an athletic motive at all. It’s to prepare my mind for life itself. Life will always be the most grueling endurance sport, and when you train hard, get uncomfortable, and callous your mind, you will become a more versatile competitor, trained to find a way forward no matter what. Because there will be times when the sh*t life throws at you isn’t minor at all. Sometimes life hits you dead in the f*cking heart.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“Remember that you also need rest, so schedule that in. Listen to your body, sneak in those ten- to twenty-minute power naps when necessary, and take one full rest day per week. If it’s a rest day, truly allow your mind and body to relax. Turn your phone off. Keep the computer shut down. A rest day means you should be relaxed, hanging with friends or family, and eating and drinking well, so you can recharge and get back at it. It’s not a day to lose yourself in technology or stay hunched at your desk in the form of a damn question mark.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“Look at your whole life, list your obligations and tasks. Put a time stamp on them. How many hours are required to shop, eat, and clean? How much sleep do you need? What’s your commute like? Can you make it there under your own power? Block everything into windows of time, and once your day is scheduled out, you’ll know how much flexibility you have to exercise on a given day and how to maximize it.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“We all waste so much time doing meaningless bullsh*t. We burn hours on social media and watching television, which by the end of the year would add up to entire days and weeks if you tabulated time like you do your taxes. You should, because if you knew the truth you’d deactivate your Facebook account STAT, and cut your cable. When you find yourself having frivolous conversations or becoming ensnared in activities that don’t better you in any way, move the f*ck on!” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“My work ethic is the single most important factor in all of my accomplishments. Everything else is secondary. To me, a forty-hour work week is a 40 percent effort. It may be satisfactory, but that’s another word for mediocrity. Don’t settle for a forty-hour work week. There are 168 hours in a week! That means you have the hours to put in that extra time at work without skimping on your exercise. It means streamlining your nutrition, spending quality time with your wife and kids. It means scheduling your life like you’re on a twenty-four-hour mission every single day.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“In the military we always say we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“We know life can be hard, and yet we feel sorry for ourselves when it isn’t fair. From this point forward, accept the following as Goggins’ laws of nature: You will be made fun of. You will feel insecure. You may not be the best all the time. You may be the only black, white, Asian, Latino, female, male, gay, lesbian, or [fill in your identity here] in a given situation. There will be times when you feel alone. Get over it! Our minds are f*cking strong, they are our most powerful weapon, but we have stopped using them.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“Life is not going to pick us up when we fall. There will be forks in the road, knives in your f*cking back, mountains to climb, and we are only capable of living up to the image we create for ourselves. Prepare yourself!” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“Most of us are motivated as hell to do anything to pursue our dreams until those around us remind us of the danger, the downside, our own limitations, and all the people before us that didn’t make it. Sometimes the advice comes from a well-intentioned place. They really believe they are doing it for our own good but if you let them, these same people will talk you out of your dreams.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
“I’m not saying that genetics don’t play a role in athletic performance, or that everyone has an undiscovered ability to run a four-minute mile, dunk like LeBron James, shoot like Steph Curry, or run the Hurt 100 in twenty two hours. We don’t all have the same floor or ceiling, but we each have a lot more in us than we know, and when it comes to endurance sports like ultra running, everyone can achieve feats they once thought impossible. In order to do that we must change our minds, be willing to scrap our identity, and make the extra effort to always find more in order to become more.” ~ David Goggins, Can’t Hurt Me
