I realized that God wasn't going to give me a get out of jail free card.
And from the time I was born
into 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.
Cause 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 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 what was me mentality?
Like, Oh my God, look at my life.
My life so f*cked up.
So I come from this f*cking family.
I'm being beaten.
I'm being abused mentally, physically.
I started looking at it as a, as a perfect trial ground.
So I had to flip it upside down.
I said, 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, what was me?
I'm never gonna get out of here.
I looked at it.
Okay.
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 will be the fuel for the rest of my life.
And so I found great strength in suffering.
Grace strengthened it because while I threw all of that,
it started to callous my mind
over the victim's mentality.
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 is going to turn out.
It's those few people who are willing to go
on the 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.
He grew so much more than the normal person
because he 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.
Spray for cockroaches made a thousand dollars 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 mentally,
on the other side was a 185 pound person who's 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 that sh*t,
all that, you have to go through, so you peek over the box,
and you go back in and say, Oh, I'm okay being 300 pounds making 1, 000 a month.
I'm okay over here.
And 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 a hundred years
and have never started their real journey.
Your real journey starts when you go outside that box
and you start climbing mountains,
It's our climbing mountains
and you think you're the top of the mountain you go down there aside
I think I'm here.
you look up, there's another mountain...
And it goes on
and it goes on and it goes on.
And just when you're getting 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.
Some criticize my level of passion,
but I’m not down with the prevailing mentalities that tend to dominate American society these days;
the ones that tell us to go with the flow or invite us to learn how to get more with less effort.
F*ck that shortcut bullsh*t.
The reason I embrace my own obsessions and demand and desire more of myself
is because I’ve learned that it’s only when I push beyond pain and suffering, past my perceived limitations,
that I’m capable of accomplishing more, physically and mentally
—in endurance races but also in life as a whole.
And I believe the same is true for you.
The human body is like a stock car.
We may look different on the outside,
but under the hood we all have huge reservoirs of potential and a governor
impeding us from reaching our maximum velocity.
In a car, the governor limits the flow of fuel and air so it doesn’t burn too hot,
which places a ceiling on performance.
It’s a hardware issue;
the governor can easily be removed,
and if you disable yours, watch your car rocket beyond 130 mph.
It’s a subtler process in the human animal.
Our governor is buried deep in our minds, intertwined with our very identity.
It knows what and who we love and hate;
it’s read our whole life story and forms the way we see ourselves and how we’d like to be seen.
It’s the software that delivers personalized feedback—in the form of pain and exhaustion, but also fear and insecurity,
and it uses all of that to encourage us to stop before we risk it all.
But, here’s the thing, it doesn’t have absolute control.
Unlike the governor in an engine, ours can’t stop us unless we buy into its bullshit and agree to quit.
Sadly, most of us give up when we’ve only given around 40 percent of our maximum effort.
Even when we feel like we’ve reached our absolute limit, we still have 60 percent more to give!
That’s the governor in action!
Once you know that to be true, it’s simply a matter of stretching your pain tolerance,
letting go of your identity and all your self-limiting stories,
so you can get to 60 percent, then 80 percent and beyond without giving up.
I call this The 40% Rule, and the reason it’s so powerful is that if you follow it,
you will unlock your mind to new levels of performance and excellence in sports and in life,
and your rewards will run far deeper than mere material success.
The 40% Rule can be applied to everything we do.
Because in life almost nothing will turn out exactly as we hope.
There are always challenges, and whether we are at work or school, or feeling tested
within our most intimate or important relationships, we will all be tempted to walk away from commitments,
give up on our goals and dreams, and sell our own happiness short at some point.
Because we will feel empty, like we have no more to give,
when we haven’t tapped even half of the treasure buried deep in our minds, hearts, and souls.
Never pick the easy road.
Never.
And it always goes back to kind of the hero mentality.
Never pick the easy road.
Ever in your life.
That is the one road that is doom.
It is doom.
If you want something like six minute abs,
all these different things, if you want it so fast,
you may achieve what you wanted.
But you want the permanent fix.
The permanent fix comes from the hard road.
The hard road gives you permanent results.
The easy road gives you the quick fix.
You will go back to where you started on the easy route.
That hard route is so permanent that it ends up callusing you everywhere,
everywhere.
You keep a six pack forever, you get it.
You keep it.
'cause you know the work that goes into it.
I know how it feels to be approaching an energetic dead end.
I’ve been there too many times to count.
I understand the temptation to sell short,
but I also know that impulse is driven by your mind’s desire for comfort, and it’s not telling you the truth.
It’s your identity trying to find sanctuary, not help you grow.
It’s looking for status quo, not reaching for greatness or seeking wholeness.
But the software update that you need to shut your governor down is no supersonic download.
It takes twenty years to gain twenty years of experience,
and the only way to move beyond your 40 percent is to callous your mind, day after day.
Which means you’ll have to chase pain like it’s your damn job!
Imagine you’re a boxer, and on your first day in the ring you take one on your chin.
It’s gonna hurt like fucking hell, but at year ten of being a boxer, you won’t be stopped by one punch.
You’ll be able to absorb twelve rounds
of getting beat the fuck down and come back the very next day and fight again.
It’s not that the punch has lost power.
Your opponents will be even stronger.
The change has happened within your brain.
You’ve calloused your mind.
Over a period of time, your tolerance for mental and physical suffering will have expanded
because your software will have learned that you can take a hell of a lot more than one punch,
and if you stay with any task that is trying to beat you down, you will reap rewards.
Not a fighter?
Say you like to run but have a broken pinky toe.
I’ll bet if you continue running on it, pretty soon you’ll be able to run on broken legs.
Sounds impossible, right?
I know it’s true, because I’ve run on broken legs,
and that knowledge helped me endure all manner of agonies on the ultra circuit,
which has revealed a clear spring of self confidence that I drink from whenever my tank is dry.
But nobody taps their reserve 60 percent right away or all at once.
The first step is to remember that your initial blast of pain and fatigue is your governor talking.
Once you do that, you are in control of the dialogue in your mind, and you can remind yourself
that you are not as drained as you think.
That you haven’t given it your all. Not even close.
Buying into that will keep you in the fight, and that’s worth an extra 5 percent.
Of course, that’s easier read than done.
It wasn’t easy to begin the fourth lap of the Hurt 100 because I knew how much it would hurt,
and when you are feeling dead and buried, dehydrated, wrung out, and torn the f*ck up at 40 percent,
finding that extra 60 percent feels impossible.
I didn’t want my suffering to continue.
Nobody does!
That’s why the line “fatigue makes cowards of us all” is true as sh*t.
Mind you, I didn’t know anything about The 40% Rule that day.
The Hurt 100 is when I first started to contemplate it, but I had hit the wall many times before,
and I had learned to stay present and open-minded enough to recalibrate my goals even at my lowest.
I knew that staying in the fight is always the hardest, and most rewarding, first step.
Of course, it’s easy to be open-minded when you leave yoga class and are taking a stroll by the beach,
but when you’re suffering, keeping an open mind is hard work.
The same is true if you are facing a daunting challenge on the job or at school.
Maybe you are tackling a hundred-question test and know that you’ve bricked the first fifty.
At that point, it’s extremely difficult to maintain the necessary discipline
to force yourself to keep taking the test seriously.
It’s also imperative that you find it because in every failure there is something to be gained,
even if it’s only practice for the next test you’ll have to take.
Because that next test is coming.
That’s a guarantee.
I had a starting point, and the starting point was this very scared, immature, fragile kid.
But through figuring out this fragile kid, I found out sh*t.
Through all this muck, this can come out the other end.
A person that has 4, 030 pull ups
who runs miles and miles and miles at a time.
But we all have these abilities, not just to run and do pull ups,
but these abilities that once we go back into our dark holes,
that a lot of us have, a lot of us come from, you know, insecurities, a lot of issues.
But we don't want to visit that place.
Place is scary.
Place is something that we want to forget about.
I had the courage, finally, to go back in there and organize it,
get it organized in my mind and figure out, you know, where to start from.
So, but the journey led me to the so called superhuman stuff that I do now.
For me, my routine is every night I stretch out
and I stretch out for two or three hours every single night without fail.
And while I'm stretching out, I'm thinking about my plan for the next day.
Now I'm thinking about all these different obstacles that may come up.
So basically a lot of us aren't prepared for life.
We get up willy nilly and just hope life is going to happen.
It is going to happen,
but it's going to happen with the prepared mind or unprepared mind.
Most people attack life with the unprepared mind.
What I do is I try to account for all things that could happen,
might happen, probably will happen, and then the unknowns.
So basically I can't account for everything.
But I do know there could be some things that come up in life that
you need to be ready for.
I know for a fact I'm not going to want to work out tomorrow.
Therefore, I'm preparing my mind for that.
I don't want to do that.
I know tomorrow will come with some difficult decisions to make.
It may come with getting a phone call saying someone died.
This happened, that happened.
I'm always preparing myself, not in a morbid way,
but just like look man, be ready for life.
Don't let life just start attacking you left and right.
Make sure that you start to build a mental armor.
So then you're ready for life.
And that comes with a very physical way
in the physical helps out the mental.