Cultivate the Mind of the Warrior [Transcript]

[Vishen]: Welcome everyone. Our guest today is someone whom you're

going to want to listen to this over and over and over again because this is one
of the most intense, awakening, like kick-in-the-butt trainings I've ever done
of any guest I've ever brought onto the show. David Goggins is an exceptional
human being, he's one of the only people in the US Military to complete SEAL
training, Ranger training, Tactical Air Control training, he's an Ultramarathon
runner, his book is called Can't Hurt Me and he is a guy who got to this level,
he's one of the most inspirational people on the internet right now. You've
probably seen him on podcasts, on shows like Impact Theory but the craziest
thing about David is how he got to this level. A couple of years ago, he was
simply a guy killing cockroaches for a living and then he made a decision in
life to do something different, to peak and look at the man he could be and
then to go through as much suffering and pain as he could relentlessly to
become that man and his message is going to wake you up. We are recording
this in New York, so you're going to hear the sounds of New York around us,
New York is not an easy place to record in and I also want you to know that
David is one of the most real, authentic and true-to-himself human beings I've
ever encountered, so he's going to speak the way he speaks unapologetically,
so know that there's going to be a ton of expletives in here and just get used to
it. Now, let's bring on the set David Goggins.

So I want you guys to remember this about this training that we're having with
David Goggins. This man is raw. This man is real. This man is not going to
sugar-coat what he's about to say. That's why I think he's such an inspiration
for so many, because it's so rare to meet someone who is so true their own
soul that they don't give a fuck what you think of them. And in fact, this
attitude is actually one of the key hallmarks of human transformation. In fact,
in transformational theory there's a name for this type of attitude. It's called
authenticity. So when you listen to David, you're going to see how one can be
truly authentic to who they are, and some of this, hopefully, is going to rub off
on you. So let's welcome to the set David Goggins.

[David]: I appreciate you having me, thank you.

[Vishen]: Thank you, David. It was, every now and then I come across a
guest that I see on a different media channel, and I watched you on Impact
Theory, and you blew me away. In fact, a random fact is David and I are the
first two ever guests on Impact Theory to come back and do a second
recording on Impact Theory. And when I was there in Tom Bilyeu's studio to
do that second recording, on the table next to me in the dressing room I saw a
plaque that said: Congratulations to David Goggin for hitting one million
views.

[David]: Right.
[Vishen]: So I'm like, who is this guy? One million view, I got to check it out.
And I checked it out. And, man, that is one of my favorite Impact Theory
episodes of all time.

[David]: I appreciate it.

[Vishen]: So let's get started, David. One of the things that is most
remarkable about you, in addition to all the records that you've hit, right, is
where you came from.

[David]: Right.

[Vishen]: Tell us about that. Tell us about where that drive, that intensity,
comes from.

[David]: Well it comes from a real place. You know, the kind of passion that I
bring to my life is something that you can't just make up. It has to come from
the sewer. And that's how I look at my life. I came from the sewer. You know, I
didn't have these great parents. I didn't have this great education. I didn't
have a real loving family. I can't remember how many, I can probably count on
one hand how many times we say I love you in my household. So my dad was
a very abusive man. He would wake up and start drinking. He loved scotch.
He'd wake up in the morning time and start drinking scotch. When he'd get
drunk, he'd get violent. And so from the time I was born to the time I was
eight years old, I experienced some serious beat-downs, from, you know, and
you never know when, like, it wasn't like you had to do something really bad.
It wasn't like that. Just be alive made him upset. So that's how I lived for
about eight years, just getting beat like that from my father, and then when
that ended, I was eight years old. We moved to a small town called Brazil,
Indiana. And that started another nightmare. And what's funny about that is
that we lived in Buffalo, New York, where all this started. And we lived in a
place called, it was 201 Paradise Road. 201 Paradise Road was the name of our
street. And it's funny because it was nothing, I mean it was the furthest thing
from paradise. It was absolute hell. You know, imagine waking up in the
morning time as a kid and all you know is, am I going to get beat today? And
the whippings weren't like, I'm going to give you like three whippings, just like
three across your butt, whatever. They were like serious beat-downs to the
point where my mom had to write letters to school excusing me from class
because I was so bruised up. So that was the beginning of my life, so with that
kind of foundation, to take that broken foundation, because you want to build
a house on a good foundation. When you have a seriously broken foundation
and you go to a small town in Brazil, Indiana, where there's a lot of racism
there. You know, and in my book, I have a lot of pictures. Like people were
are, oh my God, you didn't come up like that. Even people from that town
didn't believe that Brazil was that bad. No one wants to really see because no
one's you. No one's you. No one hears what you hear. No one sees what you
see. No one's living the way you're living. And they assume what they want to
assume because their life's a certain way. And so now I'm in Brazil, coming
from Buffalo, and that started a whole another hell for me. And I started
realizing I had a learning disability. A lot of it was from toxic stress. So I don't
believe I so much had a disability in learning. I believe that with my
foundation was so broken as a young kid, all that toxic stress caused a whole
bunch of issues. So stuttering, patches of hair falling out, white spots on my, I
mean, I still have these white spots on my skin.

[Vishen]: How old were you when all of this was happening?

[David]: So, like I said, it was, I was born in 1975. We left in 1983, so it was
about eight years old, in Buffalo, and that was nothing but beat-downs there.
But worse than the beat-downs, there's a lot of mental torture from my dad.
My dad was a great psychiatrist. He was almost a shrink. Even though he
wasn't, he was good at getting in your head, because weak people are really
good at getting in your head, because they don't want to ever see you get, like,
he was really bad on my mom. They never want to see you get above them. A
weak person wants to always keep you

[Vishen]: Pull you down.

[David]: Yes, beneath them. And I started realizing that, so as a young kid, I
was takin' notes, even though I wasn't the smartest kid, because my brain
didn't want to learn. It was caught in this hell. But I was takin' note on
everything. What makes this man this way? What makes this man this way?
So that was up until I was eight. And then when I was eight we moved to
Brazil, Indiana. And then from eight until I graduated, it was just a lot of hell.
It was one thing after another. God always put another obstacle in front of me,
so whenever I thought I was getting over one obstacle the next one would
come up.

[Vishen]: And it wasn't just the bruises. I remember in your book, Can't Hurt
Me, you spoke about how you had to cover the bruises because the more
bruises these kids in school would see, the more they'd want to beat up on
you.

[David]: Right.

[Vishen]: But it was the racism. I mean, you were growing up in like KKK
territory.

[David]: Right, right.

[Vishen]: Tell us about that.

[David]: So Brazil, Indiana was about 10 minutes from a small town called
Center Point, Indiana. And if you look it up online, Center Point, Indiana,
1995, you'll see a great picture of Center Point, Indiana, in 1995. You'll see
some pictures of people burning crosses. The Klan burning crosses. This is
1995. So now in that town, I'm not for sure how racist Brazil was, but Center
Point was where a lot of it came from. So those kids and those parents in
Center Point, those kids went to my school. So those kids traveled that 10
minutes, went to Brazil, Indiana, and they went to my school. And they grew
up in hate. So all they knew was hate. So they put that hate on me. And if
you're the black kid, so there's about five black kids that went to my high
school. So I was one of five. I think it was about 2,000 kids in my school. And
you know, one time I came out of this class one day and I saw my brown
Citation, and it had, "Nigger we're going to kill you," spray-painted on it. So
these are some things, like, I hear about bullying nowadays, and stuff like this,
if it happened now, it'd be all over CNN news. Back then, my mom was
working three jobs. By now, her fiancé, she was about to get married
December, right after Christmas. And it was when I was 14 years old. She was
about to get married. And he got murdered.

[Vishen]: Fuck.

[David]: So my soon-to-be new role model in my life got murdered. And so

fast forward now. My mom's working three jobs. We just moved out of a $7 a
month place, so we lived there for a about three or four years, and now we live
in this decent house. But it was always just a constant struggle, but I never put
my fears and insecurities on my mother, because I saw her come up. My dad
drug her down the stairs by her hair. She was constantly getting beat. And so,
when you're a young kid and you see this, you want to protect your mom. So
my instinct wasn't like to get help, tell your mom this is how your life is. She
never saw one report card of mine. She didn't know that I was going to flunk
out of school. She didn't know how bad things were. I never told my mom that
I'm getting called nigger all the time. First of all, it's not cool to be bullied, you
know, so I had two different David Goggins’. I had the David Goggins that was
afraid, that was very timid and afraid, and I had the David Goggins that
walked around like he was cool, that nothing hurt him. That was the fake guy.

[Vishen]: So even as a young man, you had to create this fake identity to
protect you from the brutality of the world you were living in. Because you had
a father who was abusive.

[David]: Right.

[Vishen]: Your mom's fiancé was murdered.

[David]: Right.
[Vishen]: You were beaten up in school. You were in a racist school, like, one
of only five black kids in a school with 2,000 white kids, in KKK territory. And
you were called a nigger all your life.

[David]: Right, well, I have to be real clear on this. What's funny about that is
that I was a pretty popular kid in that school. That's the thing. When you look
back on it, all you see is the racism. You don't see the popularity and all the
kids that liked you. The power in being able to calm your mind down and
think, that's one thing I learned in my life, is that when I was in hell I wasn't
able, I wasn't able to be in hell and be calm. Hell makes you anxious. Hell
makes you want to get out of it. It's that person who has the ability to be in
hell and think very calmly, very rationally about what the hell is going on.
What's the truth? What's the reality? Why's my dad this way? Why are these
kids calling me nigger? Why? Why? Why? You have to be able to piece people
apart. Take it down, dissect it and see what's going on. So back then I didn't
have those skills. I had no skills. All I saw was a whole bunch of kids liked me,
but I no longer saw that. All I saw was the spray-painting on my car. Me being
called nigger. That's all I saw. My lens was this big. It was very small, very
small fucking lens, where now my lens is very, it's huge. I see everybody for
who they are and what they are. So that's the one thing that changed in me
was my reality. We always paint a fucked-up reality that's not even true. It's
the reality of what we think is true because our lives aren't what we want it to
be.

[Vishen]: Now you took suffering, and you made that a superpower.

[David]: Yes.

[Vishen]: And one of the things that make you David Goggins, right, is your
belief in suffering in order to grow.

[David]: Yes.

[Vishen]: Tell us about that.

[David]: Well, I realized that God wasn't going to give me a get out of jail free
card. And from the time I was born until the time I was 19 years old, my life
had these hurdles. I constantly hit obstacles. Obstacle after obstacle after
obstacle. And I had to figure out how to manage suffering, how to deal with it,
because it'd be part of my life forever. At least that's what I thought. So in
order to deal with it, I had to be able to conquer it, and overcome it, and deal
with it, and know that in this suffering there has to be some kind of growth.
With every obstacle, I look at it as friction now. Without friction, there is no
growth. You have to have friction in your life to grow. So I started looking at
all these different things versus the woe is me mentality, like, oh my God, look
at my life. My life's so fucked up. I come from this fucked-up family. I'm being
beaten. I'm being abused mentally, physically. I started looking at it as the
perfect trial ground. So I had to flip it upside down and say, okay, I'm
suffering tremendously, mentally. Use this to your advantage versus your
disadvantage. So that's what I did. Versus looking at it as, like, oh my God,
woe is me, I'm never going to get out of here. I looked at it as, okay, hang on a
second. Hang on a second. If I can overcome this. If I can find some power in
this, some way to get through this, that right there would be the fuel for rest of
my life. And so I found great strength in suffering. Great strength in it because
why? Through all of that it started to callus my mind over the victim's
mentality.

[Vishen]: You know, and there's interesting data on that, which is why I find
what you're saying so interesting. So in Salim Ismail's book Exponential
Organizations, there's this quote that blew me away. So he was studying all of
these companies and he shares this study of Google, and Google wanted to
figure out what makes their best people. And at first they thought it was STEM
education, science, technology, engineering, math, but then what they found,
it was their best people were people who had gone through suffering.

[David]: Yes.

[Vishen]: Suffering made people more humble. It made people more kind. It
made people more sensitive to others, more empathetic. So the best people at
Google were young people who had gone through some suffering at some
point and they emerged out of that.

[David]: Right. It allows me to do this interview with you. I mean, I used to

stutter so badly I couldn't even be in, I couldn't do anything. I had no self-
esteem at all. Through suffering, but recognizing. You have to recognize what
you've gone through. And that right there gave me pride. I realized that very
few people could turn upside down what I did. I was able to turn upside down
every negative thing in my life, everything, and use it for power.

[Vishen]: You said suffering is a true test of life.

[David]: To me it's one of the biggest tests of life.

[Vishen]: Now you also said that, you said, "Motivation is crap. It's about
drive.” "I was a scared kid, and I found drive and passion."

[David]: Yes. The reason why I say motivation is crap because a lot of people
will listen to this. And they'll be motivated. They'll be fired up. They'll be so
fired up it's not even funny. But what I realized in life is to have that
motivation, motivation is just kindling. It starts the fire. But that kindling,
once one raindrop hits that little kindling, it'll burn out. That's motivation. So
right now I'm giving you a spark. You're giving people a spark. There's a whole
bunch of sparks out here. There has to be something that's deep down inside.
So motivation's like this. If you're married and your wife is okay, and your
bills are paid, and the kids are good, and the dog's good, if everything is good,
you could find some motivation, because while your life is happy, it's that
motherfucker that wakes up in the sewer every fucking day, has nothing to
fucking go home to, has nothing. Bills aren't paid. Doesn't know where when
the fucking next meal's coming, doesn't know shit, and still says fuck it, I am
going to do what I have to do to get to where the fuck I have to go. That's the
difference between motivation and drive, and then soon, obsession. Obsession
makes a person, makes other people, like, so, when you're around someone
that's obsessed, most people don't have any fucking idea what to call you. So
they call you crazy. They call you crazy because they don't understand where
you're trying to go, what the fuck you're trying to do, what you're trying to be.
So to the normal person, which we're all normal. We're all very normal. What
makes people different is a flip in their fucking mindset. Once they turn that
mindset to a point where they no longer want to be so-called normal, that's
who you start to find out that motivation is not enough. It's not enough. You
have to be that person who, no matter what's going on, if you're a big time
runner, you don't care what temperature it is. Like, a whole bunch of people I
run with, guess what they do every morning? Every night they look to see what
the fucking temperature's going to be tomorrow.

[Vishen]: Right.

[David]: What's the temperature going to be so I, am I going to run inside?

Or am I going to run outside? A person that's obsessed and wants to just get
there, they don't give a fuck what the temperature is. They no longer care,
because they know no matter what's out there, no matter if it's snowing, if it's
a damn tropical storm, if it's two or 20 below, they're going to run. They don't
care. So there's no need to waste the time to look. I'm just going to go. And
that's how you want to get your mind. It doesn't matter what the fuck's out
there, what's in front of me, because a motivated person is going to look,
because that weather is going to fucking change their motivation, up or down.
Oh, it's 70 and sunny, I'm motivated. Oh, it's 30 and a blizzard. Fuck that, I'm
going to go inside. An obsessed person doesn't care. They get the fucking job
done.

[Vishen]: Because they're obsessed with what?

[David]: With being great.

[Vishen]: Obsessed with being great.

[David]: Whatever great is.

[Vishen]: And I love that you're sharing this because just before we started
recording this, Jason Campbell, who's a host here at Mindvalley. He hosts a
show called Impact at Work. He was telling us a funny story about watching
your video. So Jason just ran a fricking Spartan Race with four other people
from my company in the middle of a typhoon in the Philippines. And while
there were travel warnings, do not go to the Philippines, typhoon is about to
hit, and many people backed out of that race, fricking Jason decided, fuck it,
I'm going to run 23 kilometers, Spartan Race, obstacle course in the middle of
a typhoon, after watching you speak about this topic.

[David]: The power of that, yes, I'm not saying do that. Not. A lot of people
get my words, and they twist them all up, and they get all confused. Don't get
confused. What happened in that race for that guy? What happened? On the
other end, so this whole thing about suffering. Yeah it sucks really bad, really
really bad. But we all live on this side of suffering. On this side, this nice box
that's very comfortable that we know when everything is going to happen.
We're in it, it's good. We know how everything's going to turn out. It's those
few people who are willing to go on this side of suffering, and once they get
through that, ask him how he feels now. His mind, how far he grew in that
short period of time, during that typhoon, during that storm, he finished that
race. He grew so much more than a normal person, because we was willing to
go outside himself, because on the other end of suffering is greatness. It's not
over here. So a whole bunch of us, we put ourselves in this great box, and in
that box, there's no suffering in it. So what we do is we shelter ourselves from
greatness. So for me, for instance. I was 300 damn pounds at one time in my
life. Sprayed for cockroaches. Made $1000 a month. I was living in that box. I
would sometimes look over the box and I saw hell, suffering, storms,
avalanches, tornadoes. I don't want to go over there. But I knew if I can get
through that shit, mentally, on the other side was a 185-pound person who
was a Navy SEAL, went through Ranger school, only person to do this, only
person to do that, only person to do this. But that's through all of that shit. All
of that shit I had to go through. So you peek over the box, and you go back in,
and you say, oh, I'm okay being 300 pounds, making $1000 a month. I'm okay
over here.

[Vishen]: Because that hurdle is suffering.

[David]: Suffering.

[Vishen]: And when you're willing to go past suffering and see that suffering
is one of the best ways you can grow, that you can overcome, because you can
suffer for the long term. You can suffer slowly, or you can go through pain and
then experience what's on the other side.

[David]: Yeah, on the other side is where you start to really start your
journey. People think they start their journey because they're born. No, there's
a lot of people in graves who have lived 100 years and have never started their
real journey. Your real journey starts when you go outside that box and you
start climbing mountains, and start climbing mountains, and you think you're
at the top of the mountain. You go down the other side of it thinking, I'm here,
and you look up, fuck, there's another fucking mountain. And it goes on. And
it goes on. And it goes on. And just when you get ready to quit, you crest that
final mountain, you get down, and you look, and there you are, and it starts to
make sense to you then. It doesn't make sense to you until you get outside that
fucking box. I'll talk to so many fucking people, and what I say is not for
everybody. So many people don't have any clue on what the fuck I'm saying
because they're in this box. And it's their brain. The mind's a very powerful
thing. It has a tactical advantage over you all the time. It knows your fears. It
knows your insecurities. It knows where you don't want to go. So it will guide
you away from that. And that's why the mind will always win until you
reprogram it. It will always win until you fucking reprogram it, because the
mind controls you. Why is that? It's your fucking mind. It's your mind.
Because all those things that happened to you in your life. All those bad
things. All those things that you blame other people for. They're now yours to
own. You got to figure out a way to reprogram your mind to get outside the
box.

[Vishen]: And so three things folks, for those of you who are taking notes
and paying attention, three things I got out of what David just said. And I'm
just connecting the dots between everyone else we have brought on to this
show. The first is that study from Google. Suffering makes us better people.
The best performers in fricking Google were the ones, were young people who
had gone through some pain in their life. And when you look at life like that
you see that sometimes pain can be a gift. Pain makes us who we are. And
people who have gone through suffering, they come out of that, and they can
bitch, and they can whine, or they can look back at that suffering and reflect
upon what they learned. And it seems that that's what you did.

[David]: Right.

[Vishen]: Right, so there is an advantage on the other side of that dark

tunnel. Now the second thing is that when you put yourself through suffering,
it changes your self-identity. When you willingly put yourself through
suffering. That's what Jason did when he ran that Spartan Race in the
typhoon, because for the rest of his life, you know, someone could dump him.
He could be put down by someone else. He could have self-doubts. But he's
the fucking guy who ran a Spartan Race in a fucking typhoon, right?

[David]: That's right.

[Vishen]: And that identity will never leave him because it's true. So when
you put yourself through something like that, you're earning a badge, right?
You know how when you were in the military, you would get all of these
badges. That's a badge. And that badge, no one can ever take away from you
because that's your story, and that is something you, that's something that's
going to hold you up from all the other shit that you go through in life. Now
the third thing that I wanted to share is I was interviewing Marissa Peer. She's
a famous British hypnotherapist, and she works with Olympians, she works
with celebrities, and she spoke about, in one of our previous episodes, she
spoke about five things that make top performers top performers, and one of
the things she observed is that all of these top performers, they willingly put
themselves through suffering. She said, now, now this was a big lesson for me,
because I was one of those people where I would get up, and I knew I had to
go to the gym or exercise three times a week. And sometimes I'd get up and I'd
make these excuses. Nah, you know, I'm too busy today. I don't feel like it. I
have a bit of the sniffles. Maybe I shouldn't exacerbate that. And Marissa
changed me in one fricking interview. She said the greatest people in the
world know that you don't do things always because they are fun. Sometimes
you will do things because they are painful, because you know that that is
what is going to make you who you are. So great performers, they willingly,
openly, consciously do things which are painful because they know that that
pain is going to get them to the next level. That flipped my mind. I never
skipped a gym day again.

[David]: You know what's funny about that, though, about the second thing
you said about the badge. It's a true statement. But it's also, there's a caveat to
that. There's a big caveat to that. That badge is earned. We earn the badge, we
go through the typhoon, we go through the Spartan Race, we do whatever we
do in life. We earn the badge, but a lot of us never want to go back again. The
badge can be earned and also forgotten. That's why you have to go back every
single day, because the mind is a very powerful thing. It doesn't want to go
there. It doesn't want to suffer. It doesn't want to suffer. So once you suffer
once, or twice, or three times, you're good. Do you think that sticks with you
forever? It doesn't. If you stop reading right now. You stop running. You stop
going to the gym. You stop mathematics, stop anything. You forgot the
equation. You forget the equation. You could be the best person in your damn
math class, but you go back four or five years later, God I got an A in this.
What, I don't remember this. It goes for everything you do in life, especially
suffering. If you do not suffer on a constant basis. And I'm not saying go out
there and run on broken legs. Suffering's different for everybody. And
suffering's just being very uncomfortable a lot. People want to know how did
you get so mentally tough, David Goggins? How'd you get there? How'd you
get there? By exactly what that hypnotherapist said. There were no mental
toughness tricks back then. There was no training back when I grew up. This
whole mental toughness craves, this came around years after I became who I
was. It was just doing. Whatever my mind said I don't want to do, I realized I
must do that, because what got me where I was at, 300 pounds, spraying for
cockroaches, a loser, not going to school, I was doing exactly what made me
feel good. And it got me exactly where I was at. Nowhere. When I started
takin' this other path over here, the path I didn't want to go on, the path of
most resistance, I started realizing, my God, this sucks like hell over here. It's
so painful and it's scary. It's dark. It's lonely. There's very few people over
here. That's when I started realizing, my God, but look at the growth I have.
Look what's happening to me. I'm losing weight. I'm smarter. I have
confidence. I have courage, the self-discipline I have, the ability to face myself
in the morning, the ability to win the war in the morning. I'm winning the war
every morning. Every morning I get up, people think I have some special
ability to get up and just workout every day. No. I now realize what my mind's
going to do. I now control my mind, versus the inner dialogue you had about, I
work out three days a week, I'm not going to go today. I have the same
dialogue. But now I know it's like breathing air. I must do this, because I know
on the other side of this, I know there's greatness over there.

[Vishen]: Wow, so take us through that dialogue. When you're running these
intense, crazy ultra marathons, right, like Badwater, or any other example,
what's going through your head when you, when you're about to hit that wall.

[David]: So I hit a lot of walls in a 135-mile race through Death Valley in the
summertime, a whole bunch of them. What we just talked about, it all comes
back to mindset. And a lot of us talk about self-talk. Self-talk is big nowadays.
It's big. But a lot of us are self-talking lies. Without having put in the fucking
work. When you get to the time when you need to draw on this self-talk, it's a
fucking lie. Mine's truth. So where I go to, at mile 75 of a 135-mile race, and
I'm broke down, and my feet are blistered up, and I'm all just jacked up. My
nutrition's messed up and I'm cramping, and I'm horrible, worst state in my
life. And I have to go another 65 miles more miles, 70, whatever it may be. I
take that time, like I talked about being calm, in calming my mind down in
hell, because when you're at mile 75, in the worst shape of your fucking life,
your mind spazzes. It realizes, I'm going 135 miles, and at 75 I can barely
fucking move. I'm fucked. So your mind says, we're done. The end is too
fucking far away. So you start drawing on all these different tools. The tools
don't fuck work for you if you haven't put the time in. So what I'm doing now,
is I'm calming my mind down before I start self-talking. And then I start to
reflect back, on all the years I put in to making myself who I am today. All the
hours, all the months I put in for training for that race. All the three o'clock in
the morning times I woke up at three o'clock in the morning, and my feet were
so fucked up, and I was so just sore from the night before that I'm sitting there
just looking at my running shoes like this, and then an hour later I put them
on. That's what I'm thinking about, all those days, all those days to get me to
this fucking moment right now at mile 75 where I'm all fucked up. What the
fuck are you thinking now? That's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking that would
not be for fucking nothing. We're going to figure out a way to get through this.
And that's what happens. But the truth comes up. The reality comes up of
what I did. If I hadn't put the time in, if I didn't have 20 times looking at my
shoes when I didn't want to go do it, and I still did it, it's the doing it when you
don't want to do it, that is what inches you forward. That is the needle mover.
It's doing it when you fucking don't want to do it. And this isn't something you
can fucking visit, man. There's people that want to visit my world and visit this
world of, like, the everyday sufferer. They visit it. They get a 20 visits at a
fucking gym. Oh, I had a fucking 20 visits at the gym, I'm good. I did a Spartan
Race, I did this. No, no, no, no, no, no it's every fucking day. You can't visit
this world. You'll get nothing from it. You get a little trophy on the fucking
wall. Good for you, man, good job.
[Vishen]: Every fucking day, I like that. I like that.

[David]: You cannot visit the world.

[Vishen]: Now this reminds me, there's something else that you speak about,
right, and, when our mutual friend Tom Bilyeu was interviewing you for
Impact Theory, you spoke about being in Afghanistan, and Tom asked you,
like, what do you do when you're asked to crash through this door, and you
don't know what's on the other side of that door, four dudes with AK-47s
ready to mow you down, or a trigger device that's going to blow off your legs,
and you spoke about how, if you choose to do something, you attack it. Let's
go there.

[David]: So it was Iraq that I was talking about, but basically, it is having a
very violence of action mentality. It is having very a focused mentality. So
imagine this, imagine that I'm about to, and this is for anybody. This isn't just
for a soldier with a gun. War doesn't mean you have a gun. You're always at
war up here. This is to give you an example of mentality. The further you're
away from something, the calmer you are. The closer you get to that, whatever
that thing is that you're about to attack, the more you start to ramp up. So let's
say the door is 20 feet away from me. I'm calm. But I'm single-focused on
what I need to do. I'm not thinking about what's behind that fucking door. I'm
thinking about I need to open the door. So I'm reading the door. I'm reading
that door, because if I get to the door, and I'm pushing versus pulling, because
it may be a door that you have to pull, versus push, now whoever's behind that
door, they know I'm coming. But to even draw it back even further than that,
as I'm getting closer to that door, I'm not thinking about wife, kids, family,
anything. As you, everything in your life has to start honing in single-focused,
hyper-focused on the task at hand. You can't be this person out here who is,
like, nowadays we're really big on being a multitasker. Sometimes in life you
have to learn to focus on the single point, and that's what happens here. So
now my aggression's going higher. My focus is getting better. I'm reading the
door. My mind is where it needs to be. It's not back at home. I'm in Iraq right
now. Or I'm, you know, wherever I'm at. This is where I'm at now. Whatever's
happening at home is happening at home. It's all about locking in to that
moment, and that's where you start to harness this strength, slowly getting
closer, and closer, and closer to the object in front of you. Once you've read
that door, now you're thinking, okay, I read the door right. Now I can't think
about what's behind the door, still now, once you open the door, now it's
about doing your job. My job, isn't, let's say there's a bunch of people with,
like, AK-47s in front of me. I can't attack them. My job is to clear this left
corner. If a guy has a AK-47 in front of me, my job is to clear my fucking
corner. So you have to once again retrain your brain to take care of whatever
needs to be taken care of, and everything you cannot control, fuck it. Fuck it. I
can't control my wife at home right now, my kids at home right now. I can't
control that. All I can control is the 20 feet between me and this door. Now the
20 feet's collapsed. Now I can control the door. Now I can control my corner.
There's a lot of things in life we try to control that we can't control, and it takes
us away from our fucking focus.
[Vishen]: Man, you're right.

[David]: And that's the whole thing about this imagery here. In Iraq I cannot
control what's happening back in Nashville, Tennessee. It's out of my control.
So why is your fucking mind there? Why is your mind there? That's what gets
people in that situation killed, but in life itself it pulls us away from the task at
fucking hand. We worry about all this meaningless bullshit. Like when I was
in Brazil. In those few kids, at that time was everybody, all 10,000 people in
fucking Brazil called me a nigger. It wasn't. It was a handful of racist kids. But
my reality wasn't there. I didn't see the picture I see now, and that's what all
this is about is seeing the real picture in front of you. What can you truly
control? Control that and move forward.

[Vishen]: And you can control living life with a sense of discipline.

[David]: Period.

[Vishen]: And focus, and let's go back to this other key idea that you brought
up, which is powerful message, guys. I want you to write this down. "If you can
do things you hate to do, on the other side is greatness." Right, you quoted
that in one of your interviews.

[David]: 100%.

[Vishen]: Let's talk about that for a moment. I think you referred to it as the
warrior mindset.

[David]: So, a lot of us are familiar with Navy SEALs. I was a Navy SEAL for
15 years. I was a polarizing person in the SEAL teams, either you really liked
me, or you fucking hated me. I started realizing why that is, and that goes for,
I'm that way with everybody. And this is why I believe in the warrior mindset.
Is that person, so for instance, guys go through Navy SEAL training, arguably
some of the hardest training in the world. They get that trident. They kick the
shit out of you during training. They make you not even want to go back to the
water. They make you semi, like not so much afraid, they make you really
respect the cold, to the point where you only do it if you have to do it. That's
the kind of mindset right there that I don't have. I do it because I have to do it
every day, not because the job is making me do it. That's the warrior mindset.
The warrior mindset is that person that is doing things that they don't want to
do every single day. And it always goes back to that. A lot of people earn, like
for instance, the Spartan Race. Good for you, man. What are you doing today?
That's the warrior mindset. A warrior crosses a finish line and continues to
run, in his mind. There is no finish line. There is no finish line. There is no
true accomplishment yet. A lot of times we live in this fucking
accomplishment world. Like let's say I did Badwater. I won the 135-mile race.
I'm going to enjoy this for a while. No, no, I'm not saying don't enjoy it. What
are you going to do fucking tomorrow? This day is over. A warrior realizes this
accomplishment is over. It's over.

[Vishen]: Embrace it…

[David]: And move on.

[Vishen]: Be happy about it, but move on and do the next thing.

[David]: Exactly. So I became a Navy SEAL, and I became this, and I became
this, and I became this. Do not live in that moment. Get out of it as fast as you
can, because it will suck you in, and that will become who you are, just that
moment.

[Vishen]: Now this is a good time to talk about the cookie jar versus the jar
of fuck.

[David]: Right.

[Vishen]: Tell us about that.

[David]: So the cookie jar is something I invented. I invented a whole mess

of shit to get me through life. I'm big on visualization. big on self-talk, but as
I've talked about before, it has to be real. So the cookie jar is something I
invented because I realized at a young age I was a pussy. And I had to develop
an indestructible mental tool box to get through my life, because I didn't like
what I saw in the fucking mirror. A lot of us are able to look in the mirror on a
daily basis. I was a big liar growing up. And I can say that now because I
overcame myself. I was a liar because I wanted everybody to like me. So I
would tell you whatever the fuck you wanted to hear, because in my mind, I
wasn't a very liked kid. In my mind. So I wanted the cool kid in my mind. Like
I said, you start to create these things. So to get through all these different
things, I started developing these tactics, these different tools, these different
tricks. And one was the cookie jar. And right now, like I talked about the race,
the Spartan Race. You're going to forget that. Trust me. When time, like when
your life gets fucking hard, and life is coming at you, you will panic and you
will forget who the fuck you are. Trust me. Me, I've been through, I've been in
three Navy SEAL Hell Weeks, I've been through 60 ultra races, pull up
records, tons of failures, all this shit. In that moment where life comes at you
the fucking hardest, do you think you sit back and think about a fucking
Spartan Race? No. You should. That's what the cookie far is for. This mental
cookie jar. You know how your mom would buy these cookies and have this
big old fucking jar, and she just liked to just start dumping shit in there. And
then when that got empty, she put some Oreos in there, and then, the next
month, maybe some Chips Ahoy, whatever. You don't know what kind of
fucking cookie you're going to get out of that thing. So for me, we grew up kind
of poor, so those cookies I savored, so that's why I talk about the cookie jar. So
for me, it's like a fortune cookie now. When times get real fucking bad for me
in life, and I start to start going down that fucking rabbit hole of shit man, my
life sucks. I'm not strong any more. The strongest person become weak. I go
back to the mental cookie jar, and I say, hang on for a second, man. Before you
become a total bitch, let's take a second and think about this, man. Is this that
difficult, that's in front of you? I go back in the mental cookie jar, pull out a
cookie, open up this fortune cookie that says, you went through three Hell
Weeks. You endured Brazil. Your stepfather got murdered. You were the,
pretty much you learned all of high school in six months, because you cheated
all through school, just to get in the military. You start to remind yourself of
who the fuck you are, because in the worst of times, when life is its worst, you
don't remember how badass you are. All you know is right now life is kicking
my fucking ass. And no one's coming to save you. There's not like you call your
shrink on the fucking phone, hey, you know, who am I? No, sorry. You have
yourself, and that's the thing I realized. I developed all these different tools
because in the worst of fucking times, you are alone. You must get your
fucking self out of the fucking sewer. No one's coming in that fucking sewer to
get you. It's dark, it's nasty, there's rats down there. It's your brain. You are
the only person that can pull yourself out. So the cookie jar is a tool to remind
you of who the fuck you really are in a bad time.

[Vishen]: Wow, I like that. Now you also mention this concept called the jar
of fuck.

[David]: That's life. Life is a jar of fuck, and that's why I believe that you
must win the war every morning. Win the war every morning is this. There's a
lot of things in life that we can control, but we choose not to. An example, let's
say tomorrow you now set in your mind you're getting at fucking six o'clock in
the morning, okay? That alarm clock goes off at six o'clock in the morning, but
you went to bed at one o'clock. Your first instinct is whatever I said yesterday,
I was comfortable. It was a nice day yesterday. I made this fucking plan at
eight o'clock at night watching TV with my fucking girlfriend and drinking a
fucking milkshake. Now it's six o'clock in the fucking morning. I'm tired.
That's that motivation shit at eight o'clock. That motivation's gone. You hit
that snooze button, you've now lost the war. The one thing you can control,
you've lost, already lost. So then you snooze. Let's say you get up at 6:45 now
because you snooze a couple times, a few times. You go in the shower, and
now your day's all late, you're started, so now you feel a little guilty now, you
fucking missed your workout. You go in the shower; you're running late for
work now. So now, all these things you can control, now once you open that
door of your apartment or your house, you're now in the real fucking world.
And guess what the real world's going to do? It's going to fuck you up. You'll
get to work. The boss may not like you that day. He may be fucking mad. So
the whole thing about the jar of fuck, you must win the war in the morning, so
then when you go into life, that you cannot control, you've already mentally
won so many battles early in the fucking morning, so you're going into fucking
war, having already won something, so you're not going to war defeated.
You're going to war knowing, I did my pushups, I did my sit ups, I read, I
meditated, whatever the fuck you do. You're prepared for what the fuck life is
going to bring you. But most of us, we walk into war with no fucking weapon.
And the weapon is this. The weapon is this. We haven't sharpened it. If you go
into a fire, and you don't sharpen that fucking blade. I'm a wildland
firefighter. We use a tool called a Pulaski. If you don't sharpen the fucking
point of that fucking Pulaski, and you start digging in fucking rock, it's going
to be a hard-ass dig. If you keep that fucker nice and sharp, like your mind,
every war you go into, you get a better chance of survival. But we fuck up in
the morning. We don't win what we can win. We leave our house a mess. We
leave our life a mess. And that's how our life becomes. A fucking mess.

[Vishen]: So get those victories straight up in the morning.

[David]: There's so many morning victories that we have that we just fucking
fail to take advantage of.

[Vishen]: Could I ask, what do you do in the morning?

[David]: Every single morning, first thing I do is I get up in the morning time
and I run. The one thing I hate the fucking most is running. So if I'm attacking
the thing I hate the most, I go home, I put a fucking chip right in the jar, in the
mental jar. I fucking won already motherfucker. I've already won. I've already
beat myself. So the only person that you're fighting every day is yourself. It's
not your boss. It's not this or that. Yeah, those are all obstacles. A lot of them
you cannot, control, those obstacles. But you can control yourself. You can
control how you start your fucking day. But we, a lot of us choose not to do
that.

[Vishen]: Now it sounds like you're talking about, really, embracing the dark
side, right?

[David]: Yes.

[Vishen]: What do you say to critics who say, look, your lifestyle is never
going to make someone happy.

[David]: So a lot of people read my face, and they say, you're stoic, you're not
happy, you're not this, you're not that. You talk so much darkness. What
people don't understand is that enlightenment, peace, you first, you first must
go through hell. You first must go through suffering to find that great peace
we're all looking for. A lot of us want to have, there's a lot of books out there
about this five-steps, do this, do this, do this, get there. No, man, it's not that
easy. To find real permanent peace and enlightenment, you must go into the
dark side of who you are. I could have easily just shoved my whole life under a
rug and went straight to peace. Are you happy there? You overcame nothing.
You've jumped hell. You skipped hell for, you forego this part of your life, you
skip it and go right to peace. So you always have this thing back here that's
haunting you, and that's that darkness. You must go into the darkness to truly
find that light that you're looking for, because that's what's on the other side of
that. People get it all wrong, man. You have to face suffering. You have to face
this dark side, this darkness. And there's a lot of energy in there. There's a lot
of goodness in there that you can use to find greatness. But you cannot find
your peace you're looking for in yourself until you've overcome yourself. We
all, like this whole Instagram world. We love showing people this world that
we have, this fake world. We show everybody the good side of us. I don't do
that shit. I want to show you how fucked up I am so you can fucking learn. I'm
not going to learn from your great big house and your trips you go on, and
your beautiful shoes. We all love to see what people have, their nice shit. Show
me your ugly shit. That's where I'm going to learn. I'm going to learn from the
dark, nasty shit that we all have, that we're all want to just scoot under a
fucking rug and say that it doesn't exist. We all have it. This is just my story.
We all have it, so the only way to fucking overcome it is to face it. Deal with it.
Overcome it.

[Vishen]: Now you said this: "I created Goggins, "the guy who can take
everything. "I'm comfortable being very un-fucking-comfortable." Tell us
about that.

[David]: So, like I talk about a lot, when I came up, I was born David
Goggins. David Goggins was a young man, a young kid, that didn't really know
true reality, was a kid that wasn't able to handle a lot of things. Me knowing
that, me knowing that my foundation was broken, I had to rebuild a whole
foundation. I had to pick up this fucking crooked-ass house that was me, pick
it up with one hand, get all this fucking concrete, I had to fucking lay this
fucking land nice and flat, get all this shit out, and rebuild this foundation,
and lay this fucking house back on a nice foundation. That foundation now is
Goggins. I had to recreate myself to a man that I wanted to be, not what the
world made me, not what life made me. Life made me a scared, timid,
insecure, afraid kid. And when you're a man, and you look at that mirror every
fucking day of your life, and you do not like the reflection in it, if you choose to
live in that, that is your fault. We have the ability to recreate ourselves, and I
decided to recreate myself in the form of Goggins. And that is a person that
said, I'm not going to be this, this guy that's insecure and afraid, all that sort of
stuff. I want to be this guy. I want to be my own hero. I want to a guy that I
look up to. I want to see me and be proud of me. I want to look in that
reflection and be proud of me. But the only way I'm going to do that is all of
that big sack full of shit, that big satchel of shit that my life had. I had to start
emptying it. And David Goggins couldn't do that. That's much too frightening,
man. Goggins had to go back there and say, I got this shit. Let's go. Let's man
the fuck up. So that's where Goggins comes from. It's a person I had to create
to start handling how to fix David Goggins.
[Vishen]: And that's the important thing, right, you're not saying celebrate
yourself, or embrace your authenticity, and none of that garbage. You're
saying, look, we have shit we're have to deal with.

[David]: Yes.

[Vishen]: We got to figure out who we want to be. We got to make sure that
the foundation of that house is stable.

[David]: That's right.

[Vishen]: And then we got to move in that direction, through the suffering.

[David]: I'm not saying go in your own ass and kiss it, by any means. That's
not it. I am saying love yourself. Be proud of yourself, but you have to be able
to go back and fix your life. No one's going to help you out. No one. Like, I
believe, there's a lot of theorists out there. There's theorists that go into a
library, take a lot of classes, read a lot of books on the mind. They read about
the mind. They know how it's supposed to work in situations. I became a
practitioner. And a practitioner is a person that doesn't read about it, actually
does it, and then studies it while he's in it. So my knowledge doesn't come
from reading a book that someone wrote that says this is how it's supposed to
be, someone that never even lived it, but they read about it somewhere. And
they took that theory and made another theory, and another theory, and
another theory. I'm the practitioner, who say, you know what, I'm going to go
in hell with my notebook and my pen, and I'm going to sit in this
motherfucker, and I'm going to see what my mind does here, how my mind
processes. But instead of leaving hell, because you can't get any data that way.
There's no data when you leave. The real fucking answers come when you stay,
so I have to say here to get the answers to what's going on up here. So
everything I talk about is not something that I read, it's something that I lived.
And I got the chance to go back through my mind and see how my mind
operated in hell. And that's how I got these answers. I'd say, oh, man, when it
was hour 72 of Hell Week, and I had another fucking two days to go, and my
body was broken, and all wanted to do was leave, what made me stay? Well
how did you stay? So I figured out what the mind was doing. It starts to ask
you all these questions, and a lot of theorists don't understand that. A lot of
theorists don't really know what the mind is doing in there. They've read
about it, but I'll tell you what it does, because I became a practitioner. I know
what the mind does in hell. I know how to process all those questions your
mind's answering. It's asking you tons of questions. Why are you here? It's
cold. It's miserable. Go home to your wife. Get a good meal. Do this, do that. If
you cannot answer those questions that your mind is throwing at you at rapid
fucking pace, you will quit. A theorist will not tell you that. A practitioner will
say, yes it will do that, but I will give you the answers to every fucking question
your mind is giving you in hell. If you have the answers, you stay. You stay
right where you're at, and you graduate, and you succeed. No answers, you
always quit.

[Vishen]: Now it sounds, it sounds like there's almost two minds within you.

[David]: Yes.

[Vishen]: There's the normal human mind. - That we all have. Which is
trying to avoid pain, right, and then there's this other Goggins character

[David]: Yes.

[Vishen]: Who's a fucking badass, who overrides that natural human mind.
Now where's that coming from? Is it your athletic training? Is it the military?
Is it your fucked-up childhood? Where did that ability of yours come from?

[David]: So I always had this voice in my head, from a young kid. We all have
a voice. I'm a spiritual guy. I don't go to church, but I believe in something
much bigger than David Goggins. And I believe that voice is God. And a lot of
us listen to it, a lot of us don't. And that voice in me was saying to myself,
you're better than this. But I didn't want to go there. Didn't want to deal with
that. Didn't want to answer those questions right now. Wasn't ready for that.
And there are two Davids. There are two, there's David Goggins and there's
Goggins. And everybody has, most of us have this one person. And that one
person guides us in the direction of least resistance. So we never grow. In
building Goggins, I had to have someone pull me from that person that quits
when times get hard. I had to form another person alongside that voice,
because that voice wasn't strong enough for me. I had to formulate someone
that had the reality, the real reality, of at the other end of this, there's a big
reward. But you cannot see that unless you push past all of that. And David
Goggins didn't have that. So I realized that I want to see what's on the other
side of this fucking mountain. How can I do that? So I was sitting back, I
couldn't just read a book. All these theories weren't going to make me do that.
Like I said, once again, it's easy to read a book and get confidence. But once
you're in hell, that confidence is gone, because now it's you and you. So I had
to build me up. I had to be my own person that had all the answers to all these
questions, because I didn't have them. David Goggins didn't have them. All I
had was, oh my God, this is getting bad. When I was growing up they called
me nigger. That's, no, I'm not good enough. Oh, this isn't, when I was raised,
my dad beat the hell out of me, he said I wasn't going to be anybody. That's
where I used to go. When times get hard, it's called surface training. It's called
surface training. My last two years in the military, they have this program
called BUD/S Prep. A lot of guys weren't getting through Navy SEALs
training, so they designed a program to get you ready for Navy SEAL training.
So, I was called upon to go there for my last two years in the military before I
retired. And we were training these fucking hybrids, guys that could fucking
run, and fucking jump, and swim fast as shit. They were smoking the hell out
of all the shit that prepared you for Navy SEAL training. Hybrids, but the
numbers never changed. The same numbers were the, so I went back to my
head, and I said, what's going on here? We were training bigger, stronger,
faster quitters. Why is that? Because so many people are afraid to go to the
one spot that truly changes your life.

[Vishen]: And what spot is that?

[David]: It's not this. It's this. We weren't training this. We were training
this, the pushups, the pull-ups, the swimming. We weren't training mentality.
We weren't getting to the root cause of the quitter. The root cause of the
quitter isn't that you can't do 100 fucking pushups. You can train anybody to
do that. The root cause of the quitter is when you get in hell you can't process
it. It's too much to process, because your mind starts going back to the real
reality of, like, I'm not ready. I'm not good enough. It's not trained. So I
started training this, realizing that the only thing that makes me quit is not the
muscle fatigue. It's the mental fatigue that makes me quit everything in life. So
I became a practitioner of the mind.

[Vishen]: Wow, now, now,

[David]: And that's where Goggins comes up.

[Vishen]: Now you said, so it's almost as if you mind eats suffering and turns
it into fuel.

[David]: It has to. It has to, because I realized that without it there was no
success. I wasn't succeeding. I wasn't succeeding. There was no success. And
people will take what I say totally fucking wrong, and that's fine. You don't
have to fucking like me, because I finally like myself. The thing about it, I
challenge people to go out there and find it. The feeling you have is endless.

[Vishen]: And you said this, "I was not guided by something "on this Earth.
"I was guided by something even more powerful. "I lived the life of a monk."

[David]: Yes. A lot of us are very surface, nowadays, especially nowadays. We

are so obsessed with computers and phones and everything. Our minds are
the most powerful fucking weapon on the fucking earth. I started realizing this
at a young age. But most of us go so far away from it because we're stuck on
how many likes did I get? How many this, how many that? We're stuck here,
so our mind's unable to fucking work. I realized for me to find myself, I had to
live my life. No, I'm not a monk. I'm not a monk. But I live my discipline, my
self-discipline of my life is very monk-like, because I'm trying to leave this
Earth. Have you ever, like, do you use a washcloth when you bathe, or do you
just use soap?
[Vishen]: Soap.

[David]: You use soap. Some of us use washcloths. So imagine this, visualize
this. Visualize you took a shower. You lathered that washcloth all up. You took
a shower, nice shower, and now you're done. You let the water hit that
washcloth to get that suds out, right. Now you want to wring that fucker out,
right, nice an tight so that it doesn't drip on the floor. That rag that you just
fucking were wringing out. I want that to be my soul, my mind. I want there to
be nothing left of David Goggins when I'm done. So most of us, I believe, die
at 40%. That's all that we've given, and we believe it's our 100%. That's why
my in book, in the back of it I describe the 40% rule, something I invented.
And I believe that I talk about in something much bigger than David Goggins.
A lot of people don't. I do. And I think that when you die, this is my own
mindset, that you arrive in line. It helps me to get past a lot of things. You
arrive in line. And let's say you're in front. Let's say you die right before me.
And you're in line. And God's sitting there with a clipboard, okay, sitting there
with a clipboard like me and you are sitting right now. He's looking at you,
and he says, "Hey, you made it to heaven. "Good job." Okay, and then he
shows you the clipboard of what your life should have been. So you lived this
life that you thought that you pushed so hard. Then you look at the clipboard.
Let say myself. This is now me, I'm talking about myself now. Let's say I got to
heaven weighing 300 pounds. I was a guy that worked for Ecolab, which is a
guy that kills cockroaches for a living, which is fine. It's a job. But then I look
at this, and that's how I died. I look at this and it says on here where I should
have been, because God's all-knowing right? I look at this, and it says you
should have been 185 pounds. You should have broken the Guinness Book of
World's Record. You should have been a Navy SEAL. You should have been
this. You should have been that. You should have lived this great life. You
should have been an inspiration. You should have inspired millions. And then
you give the clipboard back to God. Let's say you lived 80 years on Earth, and
now you realize that you lived here being a shell of who the fuck you should
have been. So now you're in heaven. But are you really in heaven? Because
now you see how much you fucking left down there on Earth. So now your
mind, your fucking mind now knows, because I was afraid to suffer, because I
was afraid to go there. I could easily right now, you could ever know who the
fuck David Goggins is right now. You could never know me. I could be back in
Brazil, Indiana, Indianapolis, Indiana, spraying for cockroaches at the fucking
local restaurant. You should never fucking know me if I chose the route most
of us choose. There'd be no fucking story. It'd be a normal story. What's your
son doing, Jackie? Ah, he's 43. He's been working for Ecolab for 20 years.
How is he, he's doing good? He's doing good. He has wife and kid. Never
fucking knowing I could be right the fuck here right now with a fucking book
coming out about what I accomplished. But I had a decision to make at 24
years old.

[Vishen]: Wow, that metaphor of heaven is one of the most powerful things
I've heard in the last couple of months. That's thought-changing, David.

[David]: Well, it's truth.

[Vishen]: The final thing I want to ask you is, one thing I notice about you is
you are unapologetically you. You are David Goggins, right, and you don't give
a fuck about how anyone else thinks of you or judges you, or how other people
show up. One of my favorite quotes of you is, "Do you. "I let you do you, and I
don't judge people. "And I'm all about doing you, "because I'm fucking going
to do me, "and I'm going to do me 'til I'm fucking dead "'because I earned that
right."

[David]: That's right.

[Vishen]: Let's talk about that for a moment. How do we become so

authentic, so real our ourself, right, and we spoke about transformational
theorists? Transformational theorists define authenticity as this. It's a
decrease in our need for other people to validate us. It is an increase in our
self-worth, and it's having a clearer personal vision. Now you embody all of
that. But where is that coming from? What would be your advice for other
people to embody that?

[David]: My biggest kryptonite I ever had in my life was caring about what
the fuck anybody thinks about me. Biggest kryptonite, it kept me fucking
shackled in my mind. It kept me so fucking shackled because I cared, oh my
God, like, for instance, I guarantee you I'm going to hear a ton of shit about he
cusses so much. Can you say your message without fucking cussing? If my life
coming up was better, I would. I would. It would give me a different tone. It
would give me a different reality about what life is. But it wasn't that way. It's
what the fuck it was. It sucked. It was hard. It was difficult. I overcame it. The
strength I get from truly, like you said, the theorists. I love theorists, talk
about being unapologetic, being authentic, most theorists, I guarantee you
man, it's a word they're saying. They go home and wish they could be what the
fuck they say. When you lie a lot growing up, you start to develop a very false
reality. I wanted that false reality to be real. I wanted to really not give a fuck
about people. I always said it, I don't give a fuck. You know, that's the tough
guy coming out. I don't give a fuck what people think about me. I wanted to
really be there. Because at the end of the day, this is how I look at it. What are
people doing for you? Are they paying your bills? No. You're going to do
whatever you have to do to succeed. They need to do them. You need to do
you. And the worst thing you could ever do, what makes person shackled, is
worrying about, if I sat here and worried right now, during this interview,
every word I would say would be thought about. I would say, oh man, I can't
say that because I'm going to offend them, and I don't want to offend them.
And I don't want to offend them. And I don't want to offend them. You can see
it in people. They're robots. They're programmed to say things that are just
right here. When you've lived a hard life. A life that you suffered, a life that
you overcame. No one helped me in this shit. No one came and fucking helped
me out, so why the fuck do I care what you think about me? No one handed
me shit. I had to fucking invent a way to succeed so I sit in this fucking right
now and watch what the fuck I say, because someone's fucking offended. What
the fuck did I really live for? What did I live? I'm giving them all the fucking
credit. No, I created David fucking Goggins. Yes, God helped me. But no one
else came to fucking save me, so why am I going to fucking watch what the
fuck I say, and care how I fucking say it.

[Vishen]: Love that, love that, David. Thank you so much for joining us on
Mindvalley.

[David]: Appreciate it.

[Vishen]: This is some, by the way, love your passion. Love your intensity. I
hope you guys enjoyed this. I was riveted. And you speak with such passion,
it's exemplary, really.

[David]: I appreciate you, man. Thanks for having me.

[Vishen]: David's book, Can't Hurt Me. I just read the opening chapter. As
we're recording this, the book hasn't been published yet, but I can tell you, it's
a powerful fricking book. You want to look up this book. You want to follow
this man on Instagram. You want to google David Goggins and read and listen
to all the stuff out there, because this guy is a kick in the butt to help you
become who you really are. And remember that heaven question. What would
you do on the day you die, when you reach heaven, and you see that list of the
man or woman you could be, and you find that you are only 40% there? And I
can tell you, as David said, that ain't going to be heaven no more. So watch
this guy's stuff, and let's jack up that 40%. Thanks, David.

[David]: Appreciate it, thank you.