David Goggins | Get Up and Get It Done

We all look for toughness. We all want it. But we look for it in a comfortable environment. You will not find toughness in a comfortable environment. Those of you who are listening to this—you will not find it. The only way you find it is to drown yourself in a position where you’re just out of sorts, where you can’t swim and you’re drowning. Where you’re drowning. Will you say, “No, ma’am. F*ck that…”

Once you come face-to-face with who you are, you have a starting point.

It’s in our head saying, “You know what, man? Dude—you’re not… you’re not doing sh*t. You’re wasting a bunch of percentage here, and this other 80% is suffering, pain, failure, failure, failure, self-doubt, darkness—and then a whole bunch of light.” But to get to this light, you got to go through all of this sh*t.

You’re not succeeding. You’re not achieving. It’s because you’re afraid to go in that dark place to find yourself.

You’re setting goals you know you can reach. And when you do that, that fear, that insecurity, that doubt—that’s where you grow. You must always set goals that you think you cannot achieve. And then there, you get better.

When that alarm clock goes off at four or five in the morning, your mind says, “No.” You just say, “This is what we do. This is what we do now.” Because to get to where you want to go, the amount of pain involved, the amount of mental pain of how many times you’re gonna have to do something that you don’t want to do to get to where you want to go…

Every day, you must ask yourself, “Did I do enough?” And then once you do this over and over and over again, it becomes like breathing.

I don’t want to live this lifestyle. But to get to the other side of this—I have to. So if you really want it, you realize what trying is and what trying is not.

Your brain is the most powerful weapon in the world. Once you put away your phones and your computers and all that sh*t we have nowadays—your brain is the only thing you have when you’re going through depression, when you—when you’re going through hard times, you’re going through death—real-life sh*t—you can’t Google that sh*t, man. 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 a day where you’re alone in this brain, and your brain is talking to you in all kinds 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 f*cked. You 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.

So—all I knew back then was hard work. You’ve got to work hard. You gotta work hard.

“I can’t get this paragraph. I can’t remember what the f*ck is in this paragraph to pass this test to get in the military…”

Read again.

“Still not getting it.”

Read it again.

“But it’s not getting it.”

Write it out.

And that’s how I started learning. I realized if I keep going back and going back and going back until the sh*t just becomes… your mind will say, “F*ck okay, we’re gonna figure it out.” It’ll find a way because he is not going to stop.

It’s like, “I’m gonna try one more time.”

No. Alarm clock goes off—we’re going back.

“I can’t read right.”

We’re going back.

I gave myself no way out. And my mind realized that. It said, “Okay. We’re gonna adapt and overcome now.”

That was my mindset. And that’s how you get through things.

You put yourself—you immerse yourself, wherever it is—and you become that.

I became Hell. And that became my new norm. I gave myself no way out. There was nothing outside these walls of Hell. Nothing.

I watched this segment on TV about these guys going through Navy SEAL training. And I couldn’t even—I—I wasn’t a great swimmer. I was afraid of the water. All this crap, man.

I saw these guys just quitting. But at the very end, it says—22 guys—this command officer’s up there, and he gives this great speech.

So I started visualizing me being the 23rd guy, sitting there with these guys. I said, “Man, if I could feel that, that would change my life.”

And what was that feeling you wanted so bad? Respect? Acknowledgment?

Victory. I wanted to win—not, like, beat somebody else. It wasn’t about that. I—I just wanted to go the distance. Everything in my life—when something got hard, I quit.

I had to work harder than you, so I quit.

Like, man, if I could just go that distance—that extra mile—to just go… just to finish.

I want to finish. I want to feel victory. And victory for me wasn’t winning—it was just finishing.

So I said, “You know what? If I could feel like these guys feel—it would change my life.”

And literally—I started feeling victory just by putting myself in the battle.

I started realizing, man—just by going to war with myself every day, and putting these challenges and these goals and these obstacles—these insurmountable obstacles—now we can move from there.

If you look at it as, “Man, I’m broken and I’m still here… now I’m fighting. I’m gonna find a way to get through this because I have no other place to go.” It gives you a lot of power.

And no one really finds himself without going through trials, tribulations, suffering. Accountability. And accountability is suffering. Being accountable every f*cking day for doing right—for yourself, for the people next to you—it’s miserable.

The more I did, the more I gained confidence. And then the more I gained confidence, the more I realized— f*ck these Navy SEALs, man… these guys can’t do what I’m doing right now.

I had no coach. Had no trainer. Had no money. I didn’t know how to lose weight. I had no knowledge of what I was doing. I was just working. I was just sacrificing.

But I would have never found these tools if I didn’t put myself in a very uncomfortable place. And your true self is found in that very uncomfortable zone.

That’s where he came from. He came from all these f*cked up obstacles—and now he’s there.

So everybody goes, “How do you do that?”

You know exactly how to do that.