It took several years for me to figure out who the devil was,
and the devil was my father.
The devil was my father,
but what I didn't put in "Never finished"
was the devil really was me.
So what happened was I put all this blame and trust me,
my father and a lot of people had to do with my upbringing
on how sh*t it was,
but like I put in that book,
no one's going to come back and say,
Hey man, I apologize.
Maybe someone does.
Very few people will.
So at the end of f*cking day,
when all of these are said and done with,
while my dad was the devil,
and I believed that for a long f*cking time,
I had to confront him.
And when I confronted the devil, so what I thought was the devil,
I realized that I was the true devil.
I was the one holding me back.
I was the one looking for the scapegoat
and you know, I was the one looking for all these ways to say,
it's okay, David, you're a loser.
You're a born loser.
So it's okay.
And I was hoping my dad was going to give me that confirmation.
And he was a loser himself.
But at the end of the day, when I left there, I realized, man,
this all me,
my dad's f*cked up, my mom's f*cked up,
the people around me are f*cked up.
They're not going to save you.
You got to f*cking save yourself, my friend.
So that's when all that reality hit me.
When I went to Buffalo to see my dad and I drive home,
I was like, man, this rest of your life is going to suck.
It is going to suck.
Not because you're going to be a loser.
But because you're going f*cking finally start to win
and winning is not easy, my friend.
I’d learned how to hold myself accountable,
and I knew I could take a man’s soul in the heat of battle.
I had overcome many obstacles, and realized that each of those experiences had calloused my mind
so thick, I could take on any challenge.
All of that had made me feel like I’d dealt with my past demons, but I hadn’t.
My memories of abuse at the hands of my father, of all those people who called me n*gger,
didn’t vaporize after a few victories.
Those moments were anchored deep in my subconscious, and as a result, my foundation was cracked.
In a human being your character is your foundation,
and when you build a bunch of successes and pile up even more failures on a f*cked-up foundation,
the structure that is the self won’t be sound.
To develop an armored mind—a mindset so calloused and hard that it becomes bulletproof
—you need to go to the source of all your fears and insecurities.
Most of us sweep our failures and evil secrets under the rug,
but when we run into problems, that rug gets lifted up, and our darkness re-emerges,
floods our soul, and influences the decisions which determine our character.
My fears were never just about the water, and my anxieties toward Class 235 weren’t about the pain of First Phase.
They were seeping from the infected wounds I’d been walking around with my entire life,
and my denial of them amounted to a denial of myself.
I was my own worst enemy!
It wasn’t the world, or God, or the Devil that was out to get me.
It was me!
I was rejecting my past and therefore rejecting myself.
My foundation, my character was defined by self-rejection.
All my fears came from that deep-seated uneasiness I carried with being David Goggins
because of what I’d gone through.
Even after I’d reached a point where I no longer cared about what others thought of me,
I still had trouble accepting me.
Anyone who is of sound mind and body can sit down and think of twenty things in their life
that could have gone differently.
Where maybe they didn’t get a fair shake and where they took the path of least resistance.
If you’re one of the few who acknowledge that, want to callous those wounds, and strengthen your character,
it’s up to you to go back through your past and make peace with yourself
by facing those incidents and all of your negative influences,
and accepting them as weak spots in your own character.
Only when you identify and accept your weaknesses will you finally stop running from your past.
Then those incidents can be used more efficiently as fuel to become better and grow stronger.
Right there on mom’s couch, as the moon burned its arc in the night sky, I faced down my demons.
I faced myself.
I couldn’t run from my dad anymore.
I had to accept that he was part of me and that his lying, cheating character influenced me
more than I cared to admit.
Before that night, I used to tell people that my father had died rather than tell the truth about where I came from.
Even in the SEALs I trotted out that lie. I knew why.
When you get beat up, you don’t want to acknowledge getting your ass kicked.
It doesn’t make you feel very manly, so the easiest thing to do is forget about it and move on.
Pretend it never happened.
Not anymore.
Going forward it became very important for me to rehash my life,
because when you examine your experiences with a fine-toothed comb and see where your issues come from,
you can find strength in enduring pain and abuse.
By accepting Trunnis Goggins as part of me, I was free to use where I came from as fuel.
I realized that each episode of child abuse
that could have killed me made me tough as hell and as sharp as a Samurai’s blade.
And that's why I talk about the warrior mentality.
And that's why so many people are lost when I start talking.
You have the right.
You're lucky that you don't have to think like warriors think.
You're very privileged.
I chose this world to be a warrior.
And I would choose it again if I came back to this world.
But the mentality of a warrior is very different than normal mentality.
You must be that person on that door,
get ready to open it, thinking to yourself,
If I die,
so be it.
The only way you can go in that door
is knowing there's a great chance you're going to die.
Like being a SEAL, you train with live ammo.
You jump out of airplanes.
Everything you do, you could die.
So to be a warrior, why people don't understand me.
I'm glad you don't understand me.
Merry Christmas.
Good on you.
Because being a warrior takes a whole different mindset.
A whole different mindset to know that there's
a great chance I may not be in the military.
Like, I was in for 21 years.
I'm lucky.
I'm very lucky that I'm alive.
Able to talk to you.
Able to still run.
But when you sign up on that dotted line
to be like a SEAL, your mentality changes.
I may not live.
You gotta accept that.
And that's the mentality you have.
I remembered as a kid, no matter how fucked up our life was,
my mother always figured out a way to stock our damn cookie jar.
She’d buy wafers and Oreos, Pepperidge Farm Milanos and Chips Ahoy!,
and whenever she showed up with a new batch of cookies, she dumped them into one jar.
With her permission we’d get to pick one or two out at a time.
It was like a mini treasure hunt.
I remember the joy of dropping my fist into that jar, wondering what I’d find,
and before I crammed the cookie in my mouth I always took the time to admire it first,
especially when we were broke in Brazil.
I’d turn it around in my hand and say my own little prayer of thanks.
The feeling of being that kid, locked in a moment of gratitude for a simple gift like a cookie,
came back to me.
I felt it viscerally, and I used that concept to stuff a new kind of Cookie Jar.
Inside it were all my past victories.
Like the time when I had to study three times as hard as anybody else
during my senior year in high school just to graduate.
That was a cookie.
Or when I passed the ASVAB test as a senior and then again to get into BUD/S.
Two more cookies.
I remembered dropping over a hundred pounds in under three months,
conquering my fear of water, graduating BUD/S at the top of my class,
and being named Enlisted Honor Man in Army Ranger School.
All those were cookies loaded with chocolate chunks.
These weren't mere flashbacks.
I wasn’t just floating through my memory files,
I actually tapped into the emotional state I felt during those victories,
and in so doing accessed my sympathetic nervous system once again.
My adrenaline took over, the pain started to fade just enough, and my pace picked up.
I began swinging my arms and lengthening my stride.
My fractured feet were still a bloody mess, full of blisters, the toenails peeling off almost every toe,
but I kept pounding, and soon it was me
who was slaloming runners with pained expressions as I raced the clock.
From then on,
the Cookie Jar became a concept I’ve employed whenever I need a reminder of who I am and what I’m capable of.
We all have a cookie jar inside us, because life, being what it is, has always tested us.
Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now,
I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.
It doesn’t have to be a big victory either. It can be something small.
I know we all want the whole victory today,
but when I was teaching myself to read I would be happy when I could understand every word in a single paragraph.
I knew I still had a long way to go to move from a third-grade reading level
to that of a senior in high school, but even a small win
like that was enough to keep me interested in learning and finding more within myself.
You don’t drop one hundred pounds in less than three months without losing five pounds in a week first.
Those first five pounds I lost were a small accomplishment, and it doesn’t sound like a lot,
but at the time it was proof that I could lose weight and that my goal, however improbable, was not impossible!
The engine in a rocket ship does not fire without a small spark first.
We all need small sparks, small accomplishments in our lives to fuel the big ones.
Think of your small accomplishments as kindling.
When you want a bonfire, you don’t start by lighting a big log.
You collect some witch’s hair—a small pile of hay or some dry, dead grass.
You light that, and then add small sticks and bigger sticks before you feed your tree stump into the blaze.
Because it’s the small sparks, which start small fires,
that eventually build enough heat to burn the whole fucking forest down.
If you don't have any big accomplishments to draw on yet, so be it.
Your small victories are your cookies to savor, and make sure you do savor them.
Yeah, I was hard on myself when I looked in the Accountability Mirror, but
I also praised myself whenever I could claim a small victory, because we all need that,
and very few of us take the time to celebrate our successes.
Sure, in the moment, we might enjoy them, but do we ever look back on them and feel that win again and again?
Maybe that sounds narcissistic to you.
But I’m not talking about droning on and bullshitting about the glory days here.
I’m not suggesting you crawl up your own ass and bore your friends with all your stories
about what a badass you used to be.
Nobody wants to hear that shit.
I’m talking about utilizing past successes to fuel you to new and bigger ones.
Because in the heat of battle, when shit gets real, we need to draw inspiration to push through our own exhaustion,
depression, pain, and misery.
We need to spark a bunch of small fires to become the motherfucking inferno.
But digging into the Cookie Jar when things are going south
takes focus and determination because at first the brain doesn’t want to go there.
It wants to remind you that you’re suffering and that your goal is impossible.
It wants to stop you so it can stop the pain.
That night in San Diego was the most difficult night of my life, physically.
I’d never felt so broken, and there were no souls to take.
I wasn’t competing for a trophy.
There was no one standing in my way.
All I had to draw on to keep myself going was me.
I was 300 pounds twice in my life.
So every day I have my shoes laid out because I hate running
people don't believe it.
I hate it
So this is what happens every day
I wake up out of my bed
and There's my shoes, my shirt, my shorts
depending on the weather.
There's some days I wake up and I just look at them for hours and then I start
There's some days I wake up and I just look at them for hours
and then I start walking around the house
and I say I don't even run today.
I'm not doing any sh*t today.
Nothing.
I don't have to.
That's when I think,
I got 2.3 million followers on Instagram.
You have an obligation, not to yourself,
but to everybody out there that is touched by what you do as a human being.
While nobody knows what I'm doing, no one is videoing me.
I am a virtual trainer, mentally.
Because there's a lot of people out there that say,
Man, David Goggins is what I'm looking after today.
And if I wake up one morning and don't do that,
I go back to that David Goggins who lied about being who he wanted to be.
So, my thing that keeps me going every day is my mission in life.
Well, I did not choose it.
I'm an introvert and I f*cking hate what we're doing even right now
is to always stay the f*cking course
because you know exactly what it is to not man up.
I've done that too many times in my life.
So that's what keeps me going.
It’s time to visualize! Again, the average person thinks 2,000–3,000 thoughts per hour.
Rather than focusing on bullshit you cannot change, imagine visualizing the things you can.
Choose any obstacle in your way, or set a new goal, and visualize overcoming or achieving it.
Before I engage in any challenging activity, I start by painting a picture of what my success looks and feels like.
I’ll think about it every day and that feeling propels me forward when I’m training, competing,
or taking on any task I choose.
But visualization isn’t simply about daydreaming of some trophy ceremony—real or metaphorical.
You must also visualize the challenges that are likely to arise
and determine how you will attack those problems when they do.
That way you can be as prepared as possible on the journey.
When I show up for a foot race now, I drive the entire course first,
visualizing success but also potential challenges, which helps me control my thought process.
You can’t prepare for everything but if you engage in strategic visualization
ahead of time, you’ll be as prepared as you possibly can be.
That also means being prepared to answer the simple questions.
Why are you doing this?
What is driving you toward this achievement?
Where does the darkness you’re using as fuel come from?
What has calloused your mind?
You’ll need to have those answers at your fingertips when you hit a wall of pain and doubt.
To push through, you’ll need to channel your darkness, feed off it, and lean on your calloused mind.
Remember, visualization will never compensate for work undone.
You cannot visualize lies.
All the strategies I employ to answer the simple questions and win the mind game
are only effective because I put in the work.
It’s a lot more than mind over matter.
It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day,
but if you do, you’ll find that at the other end of that suffering is a whole other life just waiting for you.
This challenge doesn’t have to be physical, and victory doesn’t always mean you came in first place.
It can mean you’ve finally overcome a lifelong fear or any other obstacle that made you surrender in the past.
Whatever it is, tell the world your story about how you created your armored mind
and where it’s taken you.