David Goggins: “These 2 min 13 secs Changed My Life!” Do THIS When Life KNOCKS You Down!

SUMMIT OF GREATNESS 2 WEEKS AWAY! And David Goggins is speaking at the event! Tickets are going fast -- get them before they sell out at lewishowes.com/tickets. In this powerful episode, I sit down with David Goggins, retired Navy SEAL, ultra-marathon runner, and author of "Can't Hurt Me". Goggins shares his incredible journey from an abused and struggling child to becoming known as "the toughest man alive". With raw honesty, he discusses overcoming severe learning disabilities, racism, and obesity to push himself to extremes and unlock his full potential. Goggins offers hard-earned wisdom on building mental toughness, embracing discomfort, and refusing to quit. His intensity and no-excuses approach to life will leave you inspired to push past your own limits and tap into your hidden strength. In this episode you will learnHow facing your insecurities and weaknesses head-on is the key to building true confidenceWhy choosing the harder path in life leads to permanent positive changeThe power of daily discomfort in expanding your capabilities and mindsetHow to build "mental armor" to face life's challenges through consistent hard workWhy reflection and appreciation for your journey is crucial for continued growthThe danger of becoming too comfortable and "civilized" in lifeFor more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1660For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:Eckhart Tolle – https://link.chtbl.com/1463-podRhonda Byrne – https://link.chtbl.com/1525-podJohn Maxwell – https://link.chtbl.com/1501-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Goggins?

  The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. And once you do that on a daily basis, it's not about the running. Most of us, we live in a box. And we don't want to go outside that box at all, ever. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. What we do is we shackle our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind that this is all I can do.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL. An ultra marathon runner. He also held a Guinness World Record for the most pull-ups completed in 24 hours.

• 0:33David Goggins?

  Is one of the toughest men on the planet. Who's gonna carry the boat? I come from my father. I have what he has, and I didn't want to be him. Why he made fun of me, why he beat the hell out of me, my brother, my mom. It comes from a dark place, an insecure, dark, dark place. A good human being doesn't need to break anyone down. All they do is want to build you up. When you get to where you want to go in life, you finally get there. You finally reached that point. And you're there and you're happy as hell. Realize this.

• 1:13David Goggins?

  You're not there yet.

• 1:18Lewis Howes?

  I'm so excited for you to check out this interview with David Goggins. His mindset and his level of thinking just continues to inspire millions of people around the world. And if you haven't heard yet, David is speaking live at the Summit of Greatness in Los Angeles next month. Make sure to click the link in the description below to get your tickets to see him live, along with Dr. Joe Dispenza, Cody Sanchez, and more. And without further ado, let's dive into this episode. Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. We have the inspiring David Goggins in the house. Good to see you, man.

• 1:52David Goggins?

  Thank you.

• 1:53Lewis Howes?

  Very excited about this. I first heard about you through Jesse Isler's book, Living with a SEAL. And he came on to talk about his experience. And he actually didn't mention your name because you didn't want to be known.

• 2:05David Goggins?

  Right.

• 2:05Lewis Howes?

  A few years ago.

• 2:06David Goggins?

  Right.

• 2:07Lewis Howes?

  But now you're wanting to be known and you're putting your message out everywhere.

• 2:10David Goggins?

  Right.

• 2:11Lewis Howes?

  And I'm just curious quickly, why did you want to not be known then? But now you do want to have your message out there?

• 2:17David Goggins?

  Well, when Jesse wrote that book, Living with a SEAL, I was a... I was about two or three weeks from getting out of the military. So, you know, being a SEAL, you know, I didn't want to be, mention David Goggins in his book. So, the second the book popped, I was retiring. So, the book came out November fifteenth, or November one, two thousand fifteen. And I, uh, retired November two thousand fifteen. So, that's why, that's the, that's the biggest reason why.

• 2:45Lewis Howes?

  And when did you start putting yourself out there, doing interviews and talking about your message? And you got on social media and started sharing videos. When, when did you decide to do that?

• 2:54David Goggins?

  Well, I've been talking to people for several years. And I wasn't really big on, like, my mindset's very different than most people.

• 3:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:02David Goggins?

  It's a mindset of, um, I don't want to be known too much. I don't want too many looky-loos in my life. Because that's where I gained my strength. I gained my strength from a place of quiet.

• 3:14Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 3:15David Goggins?

  And the more I got my story out there, the more I realized it no longer be David Goggins, the quiet man. It'd be David Goggins, the guy that's on Instagram, answering this, answering that, because I'm also a guy that's always about, if someone reaches out to me, I'm like a sit back and say, oh, you know, whatever. I'm gonna reach back to you. So, it's gonna take time.

• 3:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:35David Goggins?

  Out of me trying to gain strength and me trying to get running to go. So, that was a big deterrent for me to get on Instagram and all that stuff. I'm not, I'm not big on social media anyway.

• 3:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:44David Goggins?

  But then I realized that I have a very, God put me in a very interesting spot in life. Where he made hell my teacher.

• 3:55Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 3:56David Goggins?

  He made hell my teacher. And a lot of people don't understand that. So, I'm trying to give people a different thought process of life. Where failure, hell, disappointment, discomfort is a great learning tool. And many people don't understand that. And a lot of people won't, won't even understand this interview when we get done with it. But it's these few moments in life that you have. Like, for me, I always talk about it. Rocky one, round fourteen. That one two-minute and thirteen-second clip of.

• 4:34David Goggins?

  Rocky getting up when Apollo knocked him down. That one clip, when I was going through a very bad time in my life, I saw what I wanted to be. It wasn't a guy that won. It wasn't a guy that won everything he did. It was a guy that kept getting up after being knocked down. So I realized if that two minutes and thirteen seconds changed my life. So I was. I saw something that I needed to be in the world I was living in. Maybe my story will give someone the two minutes and thirteen seconds they need to change their life. Means that people live in a very comfortable place. That's fine. Don't listen to me.

• 5:18David Goggins?

  A lot of people are looking for that two minutes and thirteen seconds. And I might be that person. That's why I started sharing it.

• 5:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you talked about in the very beginning, I like this.

• 5:31Lewis Howes?

  What do you say here? Your job is to be the best of your ability. This will hurt. The mission is not about making yourself feel better. The mission is about being better and having a greater impact in the world. And it sounds like you understand the fact that you need to put yourself out there a little bit more.

• 5:46David Goggins?

  Right.

• 5:47Lewis Howes?

  Is gonna reach more people and impact more people as opposed to always being quiet.

• 5:50David Goggins?

  Right.

• 5:51Lewis Howes?

  Is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 5:52David Goggins?

  Exactly. I, I, I define a happy medium.

• 5:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 5:55David Goggins?

  You know, I, I define a happy medium because what's the point? Like, we all have a story. And I believe that we're all, we're all teachers. We're all teachers. And if you don't learn something and give back, we, we, like, like what you learned.

• 6:12Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:12David Goggins?

  What's the point of living?

• 6:13Lewis Howes?

  And you're wasting.

• 6:14David Goggins?

  Yeah, you're wasting. You, you have all this knowledge of what you learned. Some people may think you're crazy. Some people may, you know, may put a title on you. But it's, it's, it is, you know, it's, it's those few people who are like, you know what? I need to hear that.

• 6:26Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:27David Goggins?

  So you have to put yourself out there.

• 6:28Lewis Howes?

  So was there an awakening for you in the last few years that said, okay, I'm not, I'm not doing this enough? I'm putting myself out there. I'm not telling my story. I'm, I'm wasting certain aspects of my life by not giving that message out?

• 6:42David Goggins?

  There are a lot of emails that came in to me. And I didn't realize, you know, when you live your life, you don't know what it's doing to people because it's my life. I didn't know my life was as bad as it was because it's my life is what I went through.

• 6:57Lewis Howes?

  Think it's like the norm.

• 6:58David Goggins?

  It's the norm.

• 6:58Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:58David Goggins?

  That's why I did, man. But when I started getting these emails from people saying, hey, you know what? You changed my life. That part changed my life. That part of your story changed my life. And cause I have so many different parts of my life. That so many people resonate with different spots. Maybe it's the obese part. Maybe it's the bullying part. Maybe it's the learned disability part. Maybe it's the abusive parent part. Whatever it may be.

• 7:22Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 7:23David Goggins?

  So many people draw from my story. And I started getting these emails and I was like. God, man, you know. And I'm a big believer in something more powerful than me. I don't know what it is. But I'm not the end all. So I was like, uh. I gotta start doing more.

• 7:40Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 7:40David Goggins?

  If I'm touching these people's lives.

• 7:42Lewis Howes?

  Few people here and there.

• 7:43David Goggins?

  Right, maybe I need to go out here and do some more.

• 7:46Lewis Howes?

  Crazy story, man. I mean, if you guys um. Haven't gotten the book, you guys can preorder the book. This is actually a galley copy here printed out. Uh, make sure you guys check this out. Can't Hurt Me. Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds. And I was, when I was reading the, the uh, the first part of the book about your childhood. I mean, your father just seemed like. Was just so abusive physically. I mean, it's one thing to be emotionally abusive and another thing to be physically. And when you have both. It's like the perfect storm of like the makings for chaos in your life.

• 8:15David Goggins?

  Right.

• 8:15Lewis Howes?

  And it just sounded like he was just nasty.

• 8:18David Goggins?

  Hmm.

• 8:19Lewis Howes?

  Nasty and everything was your fault and you were always wrong and you weren't living up to a standard. Both you and your brother and your mom.

• 8:25David Goggins?

  Right.

• 8:26Lewis Howes?

  And it was just constant physical abuse over and over. I mean, the story of you just being bent over and him just like whipping you over and over. And you just gasping for air. I was just like, oh, my gosh, this is crazy.

• 8:35David Goggins?

  Right.

• 8:36Lewis Howes?

  Um, how did you deal with that? How did you like? Overcome the constant physical and emotional abuse?

• 8:43David Goggins?

  You know what?

• 8:45David Goggins?

  It's all I knew.

• 8:46Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:47David Goggins?

  So when you're born to that, it's all you know. You, I mean, you know something's not right. Because in my mind, at a young kid, I could tell, man, you know, the way I was processing things wasn't right.

• 8:58Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 8:59David Goggins?

  I mean, I suffered from severe toxic stress. And that was one of the big reasons why I started, you know, I had a learning disability. My focus in life was way off. I was afraid. I was afraid of everything. And when you have that kind of foundation, um, growing up, and that's where you start life at. Is being be being abused and also working all night at a skating rink, not going to school. And you have a guy who's an alcoholic. And the second he got drunk, he got mad. And so our house lived in fear.

• 9:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 9:35David Goggins?

  And the one thing that you can't ever get out of a kid's mind is your mom's mind, like, like your mom's face.

• 9:43Lewis Howes?

  The terror.

• 9:44David Goggins?

  The terror of your mom's face. So, you know, you know, I didn't care about my brother, I didn't care about me. But I saw this woman go from Mary Poppins, the sweetest person on the planet earth. And when you see your mom start to transform to a shell, to a person whose face becomes stoic. A person who has no emotion. And that changes the kid.

• 10:10Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:10David Goggins?

  And when you're young and you have to grow up so fast, so about eight years old, my mind was of a, of a forty year olds at eight. You know, my family, like, life came at me. And it makes your brain, you know, you're not outside playing with kids. You know, you're trying to avoid getting beat.

• 10:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:29David Goggins?

  You know, you're avoiding all these things.

• 10:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Then you go home, it's supposed to be safe.

• 10:33David Goggins?

  Right.

• 10:34Lewis Howes?

  And you're getting beat again.

• 10:34David Goggins?

  Exactly. And what's funny about that, we lived in, on, on Paradise Road.

• 10:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:39David Goggins?

  We lived on Paradise Road and it was.

• 10:42Lewis Howes?

  Wasn't so paradise.

• 10:43David Goggins?

  It was anything but paradise, man. You know, once those doors shut.

• 10:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 10:46David Goggins?

  You know, my dad gave everybody a different view of him.

• 10:49Lewis Howes?

  He wore the nice tailored suits, he smiled.

• 10:52David Goggins?

  That's right. Your dad's amazing. Those doors shut, man. And the devil himself came out. So it was, it was, it was rough and that's why my foundation was so uh was so beaten down as at no at a young age.

• 11:05Lewis Howes?

  So learning disability, I grew up dyslexic, so I can relate to that of just like constantly feeling stupid and insecure. And you know, I had a tutor my entire life.

• 11:14David Goggins?

  Horrible.

• 11:14Lewis Howes?

  Till I finished college, I had a tutor.

• 11:16David Goggins?

  Right.

• 11:17Lewis Howes?

  Second grade reading level when I was in eighth grade, it was just like a constant struggle.

• 11:21David Goggins?

  Right.

• 11:21Lewis Howes?

  Emotionally. And I took that outlet into sports and said, I'm gonna just train myself to be the best I can be. In a place where I can learn something differently.

• 11:29David Goggins?

  Right.

• 11:30Lewis Howes?

  And pick up a different skill. But with your, with your learning disability, with your dad beating you, screaming at you, emotionally challenging your mind with uh the racism you dealt with, with uh the different struggles you felt with bullies. What was the cha- the hardest obstacle to overcome from up until about fifteen, sixteen?

• 11:51David Goggins?

  The hardest obstacle was myself. I started realizing more and more and more that all these people were gone. What was haunting me was me. I can't control my dad. I can't control the people calling me. I can't control all these things. But they were things that kept me down. It started becoming my reality. My reality was what they made it out to be. And I became the most important conversation you'll ever have with your life, you know, in your life is when you have yourself. And my conversation was absolutely horrifying.

• 12:29Lewis Howes?

  What were you saying to yourself?

• 12:30David Goggins?

  I'm dumb. I'm nobody. My dad, I mean, my dad was great in mental warfare. A drunk, insecure man. Will make everybody around him feel like hell.

• 12:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 12:45David Goggins?

  Because he wants to give you no power. And that's why he was so mean to my mom and myself and my brother. Cause he didn't want anybody to get above him.

• 12:54Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:55David Goggins?

  He wanted to keep you down low. So when you're growing up with all this stuff, all this hate. It it wasn't the beatings. I could take the beatings all day. It was a mental torture. So when, at a young age, your your parents put a dialogue in you of confidence. Or you're nobody.

• 13:12Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 13:13David Goggins?

  So that voice in my head was I'm a loser. And then it was confirmed. When I got in school and in third grade, I was falling behind. They want to put me in a in a special school.

• 13:24Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:24David Goggins?

  You know, with kids who can't learn.

• 13:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 13:27David Goggins?

  Then it was confirmed, what you know, what my dad was saying. So that confirmed it. Then I started cheating. So I started realizing, you know what, I'm taking the easy way out again.

• 13:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:36David Goggins?

  And it started snowballing from there. Now, now the kids are calling me.

• 13:39Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 13:40David Goggins?

  But it wasn't all the kids. So what happens is you start to get this picture that everybody hates you. Because your reality becomes so, so big.

• 13:50Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:51David Goggins?

  That you don't, I mean, you can't see the clear picture.

• 13:53Lewis Howes?

  It might have been three or four kids.

• 13:54David Goggins?

  That's it.

• 13:55Lewis Howes?

  Doing it over and over.

• 13:56David Goggins?

  Right. But it was the whole town.

• 13:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 13:57David Goggins?

  Everybody hated me. So.

• 13:59Lewis Howes?

  The world hates me.

• 14:00David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 14:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:01David Goggins?

  And that's when it, that's when it became toxic. And that is where I became my worst enemy.

• 14:07Lewis Howes?

  Wow. So those are the conversations.

• 14:09David Goggins?

  Those are the conversations.

• 14:11Lewis Howes?

  When did you start to realize that those conversations weren't supporting your life?

• 14:16David Goggins?

  I was a, so my mom was getting ready to get married. And this guy came into our lives, name was Wilmeth. He came into our lives and like I always say, whenever my life's getting better. Guy will put another challenge in front of me. He gets murdered.

• 14:33Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 14:35David Goggins?

  And we moved back to Brazil. So so we moved from this town, this small town in Brazil, and we moved to Indianapolis, Indiana. A lot more blacks, a lot more different colors.

• 14:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Weren't you living in New York at some point too?

• 14:49David Goggins?

  I was born in Buffalo, New York.

• 14:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 14:50David Goggins?

  And I went from Buffalo to Indiana, and then from Indiana to Indianapolis, Indiana. Indianapolis, Indiana, you know, he got murdered when I was in Indianapolis. We went back to Brazil. We went back to Brazil. This is when the racism started.

• 15:02Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 15:02David Goggins?

  Cause now I'm sixteen. So when I was first in Brazil, I was eight and nine. Kids don't care.

• 15:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:09David Goggins?

  You're just a kid. I look different, but kids don't care.

• 15:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 15:11David Goggins?

  Kids don't know. But when I moved and I came back, I'm no longer a kid. So all the kids I grew up with, I'm now different. I'm different. So there's about five black kids in my school. And um, the reality came when I came out one day and all my car was spray painted. They were gonna kill you.

• 15:32Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh. In, in Brazil?

• 15:34David Goggins?

  In Brazil.

• 15:35Lewis Howes?

  In Portuguese?

• 15:36David Goggins?

  No, no, my fault. Brazil, Indiana.

• 15:37Lewis Howes?

  Oh gosh.

• 15:38David Goggins?

  Yeah, my fault, Brazil, Indiana.

• 15:39Lewis Howes?

  I was like, oh, you went to Brazil. I was like.

• 15:41David Goggins?

  No, no, Brazil, Indiana.

• 15:42Lewis Howes?

  Brazil, Indiana, yeah.

• 15:43David Goggins?

  Yes.

• 15:43Lewis Howes?

  From Indianapolis to Brazil, Indiana. Got it.

• 15:45David Goggins?

  So I uh, was in Brazil, Indiana, and about ten minutes from Brazil, Indiana is a small town called Center Point, Indiana.

• 15:52Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 15:52David Goggins?

  And Center Point, Indiana is, was at that time, a huge hub of the KKK.

• 15:58Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 15:59David Goggins?

  In nineteen ninety-five, the Klan marched in a Fourth of July parade. And I don't know if the pictures, if, if, if any pictures are in there. But if not, there's a picture in the book.

• 16:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 16:08David Goggins?

  In nineteen ninety-five, ten minutes from my house, of crosses being burnt.

• 16:13Lewis Howes?

  Ten minutes from your house?

• 16:14David Goggins?

  Ten minutes from my house.

• 16:15Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 16:16David Goggins?

  So, when you have all this negativity growing up, and now you're cheating, and you're doing this, and you, and, and, and your dad beats you, and you know, your, your mom's fiance gets murdered, and tragedy after tragedy after tragedy, and then you come to this. And your mom's working three jobs. You know, she's not home at all. She never saw one report card of mine. She didn't know how bad off I was in school. She was hustling, trying to make money. And I was the man of the house, lying, sneaking around, not going to school.

• 16:46Lewis Howes?

  Cheating, stealing.

• 16:46David Goggins?

  Right, everything I could.

• 16:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 16:48David Goggins?

  And um, so, I, I, I walked out of school one day and saw this, they were gonna kill you on the car. And I went in to get the principal. There's several incidents like this to happen. I went to get the principal, the principal. He he didn't have anything. He he couldn't give me any advice. And I didn't want to tell my mom about it, cause my mom was already bothered by my dad beating her down and now her fiance got murdered. So I didn't want to.

• 17:12Lewis Howes?

  The last thing on her mind. She's like, I've dealt with this my whole life.

• 17:15David Goggins?

  Right. I didn't want to bother with anything, man. So I kept everything away from her. So I'm in the car wash trying to trying to scrub this stuff off and I got home and so happens, two weeks later, she gets a note from school. And the note says, your son is going to fail. He's not going to graduate. And she's like, what is this? And I had to come clean with my mom. Of all the years of me cheating, of all the bullying, of all this and all that. And she was such in a bad spot in her life. That the best thing she could do was like, hey, you know, you're you're gonna fail. You're gonna fail school.

• 17:51Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 17:52David Goggins?

  And I I I was like, my god, man, like, you know, she she was in a dark place. And I was in a dark place. And we were kind of on our own, in in the same house, but living different lives. And I realized at this time in my life, she was a great mom, but I was on my own. And that's when a real big change happened for me. So I said, I'm gonna join the military.

• 18:14Lewis Howes?

  This is six seventeen.

• 18:15David Goggins?

  Seventeen, you know, I wanted to go into the delayed entry program. And I went to take the ASVAB test and I cheated. So.

• 18:23Lewis Howes?

  That's what you knew.

• 18:24David Goggins?

  That's what I did. So I got my friend. Cause I walked into recruiter's office and recruiter says, hey, you gotta take this ASVAB test. Second I heard test, I was like, man, oh, hang on a second.

• 18:34Lewis Howes?

  I can't test, it's saving my life, man.

• 18:35David Goggins?

  I'm gonna go, can I come back tomorrow?

• 18:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:38David Goggins?

  So I come back and the uh, the the recruiter starts handing these tests out. And I'm like, great, I'm gonna sit by my boy, I'm gonna copy off my boy. He had a different test than I did.

• 18:48Lewis Howes?

  Ooh.

• 18:49David Goggins?

  So I couldn't copy off him. And that's when the light bulb hit on. So I failed this test several times.

• 18:54Lewis Howes?

  Twice or.

• 18:55David Goggins?

  I failed it twice. I actually failed it. I failed it twice. And the third time, I said, mom, I need help.

• 19:01Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 19:02David Goggins?

  And she said, um, we don't have much money, but we can afford a tutor for one hour a week for six months, cause this is my last time taking the test. And so I had to learn, so I had a third grade reading level. I'm a junior in high school.

• 19:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:15David Goggins?

  So I had six months to learn all this stuff. And I only had to tutor for one hour a week. So basically what happened was she would come in for an hour and I I wasn't picking it up. Any of it, I just couldn't retain anything.

• 19:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 19:30David Goggins?

  And it was so much to learn that overwhelmed me. So basically what happened was I realized. I had to go by the store and buy spiral notebooks. And I had to literally write down every single thing repeatedly. Like, so what may take you an hour to learn? It took me hours, six, eight, nine, ten hours, I had to write the same thing down.

• 19:54Lewis Howes?

  Simple stuff.

• 19:55David Goggins?

  Simple stuff.

• 19:55Lewis Howes?

  I hear you, man.

• 19:56David Goggins?

  So I started, yeah.

• 19:57Lewis Howes?

  It's my life.

• 19:58David Goggins?

  So I I had to memorize.

• 20:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:00David Goggins?

  What I, so I didn't really learn it. I could just recall it from writing it down so many times on page seventy one, I remember seeing that.

• 20:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:08David Goggins?

  And that's how I did it. And I ended up passing that test.

• 20:11Lewis Howes?

  Crazy.

• 20:11David Goggins?

  And I got in the military, so.

• 20:13Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 20:13David Goggins?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Lewis Howes?

  What was the greatest lesson your mom taught you growing up?

• 20:18David Goggins?

  Honestly, the greatest lesson she ever taught me is a lesson that she, she doesn't know how much she taught me. Because she wasn't much in a teaching mode. My dad took her soul.

• 20:29Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 20:29David Goggins?

  But what I did as a young kid is I observed everybody. I wasn't really smart in the books.

• 20:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:36David Goggins?

  But I was real smart when it came to life.

• 20:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:39David Goggins?

  And I was able to sit back and watch her mistakes. I was able to see how she struggled through life and how I don't want to struggle through life. And I was able to see, she never picked me up. The biggest thing she did for me, and this is honest to God truth, and she doesn't even know she did it. When I would bust my ass, when I would fail.

• 20:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 20:59David Goggins?

  When I was at the bottom of the sewer, she never picked me up. She never gave me that cookie and said, hey, son, you know, it's gonna be okay. She didn't have time for that. And sometimes she gets upset when I talk about my past because it it it paints her out to be not the best mom. If I had any kind of mom in that kind of environment, I would have never made it. Because she forced me for every reason, she forced me to you better figure this out. Or you're gonna be a statistic. And this is something that she didn't sit down and tell me. I realized this, this is the world that is in front of me. And what most people do is they see this world and they look at it as an excuse to get out of it.

• 21:46David Goggins?

  I started looking at it as this is the ultimate training ground for the rest of my life. I have all these valuable lessons, because if you look at the world right now today, it's not a nice place. But I'm very prepared for it.

• 22:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you are.

• 22:02David Goggins?

  I'm prepared for it. I'm prepared for all the failure coming my way. I'm prepared for everything my way. And that's the biggest lesson that she taught me by not teaching me. By never saying it's gonna be okay. Matter of fact, she told me the exact opposite. Life sucks. That's what she knew. And it was the truth.

• 22:22Lewis Howes?

  That was her reality.

• 22:23David Goggins?

  That was her reality. And so I saw that. And so I started at that point in my life, I have a lot more failures as you see in that book. But I started down the road of instead of the path of, you know, least resistance. I started choosing the path of most resistance to prepare myself for the journey that was coming my way.

• 22:43Lewis Howes?

  Wow. And most kids don't prepare themselves for the most resistance. They wanna get out of things.

• 22:47David Goggins?

  They wanna get out of things.

• 22:48Lewis Howes?

  Get off the hook, don't put in the extra reps. They want the easiest path to get to the top.

• 22:53David Goggins?

  Right, exactly.

• 22:55Lewis Howes?

  You know, I, I, I look at my life as like, and here you talk about like really diving into pain and like embracing pain and finding, looking for the pain.

• 23:04David Goggins?

  Right.

• 23:05Lewis Howes?

  And I think there's like a, there's a, there's a safe pain and then there's a probably an unsafe pain of just like jumping off a building and you know, whatever.

• 23:13David Goggins?

  Right.

• 23:13Lewis Howes?

  Trying to land on 20 floors or something. It's probably not the safe way to do things. But doing 200 miles of endurance running is like a different way of pain, looking at pain. And that's what I've been looking for my whole life is like finding the pain and I talk about like do something every day that, that's painful.

• 23:30David Goggins?

  Right.

• 23:30Lewis Howes?

  In a good structured environment. You've been doing that for the last couple of years now. It's like you work out every day. You haven't missed a day.

• 23:36David Goggins?

  I do it for the last 20 some years of my life.

• 23:39Lewis Howes?

  20 years? Or they said two years?

• 23:41David Goggins?

  No, 20 some years of my life.

• 23:42Lewis Howes?

  20, every day you work out.

• 23:43David Goggins?

  So, I used to take one day off a week. I used to take one day off a week.

• 23:49Lewis Howes?

  For the body to recover, right? Makes sense.

• 23:51David Goggins?

  But that one day off was an active recovery day where I would get on a trainer and ride for like two hours. But at a, at a zone one heart rate, very low heart rate and I replace the carbohydrates in my body while I rode because the best way to recover for me is to do something at a very low heart rate because therefore your blood's flowing through your body. As your blood's flowing through your body, refuel it with the nutrients. Cause then your blood's flowing, the nutrients is going through all your cells in your body. All that glycogen is now flowing at a low heart rate. So it's not burning it, it's refueling it. So every Sunday used to be that and it kind of snowballed into as human beings,

• 24:33David Goggins?

  we believe like so many people before I give them a workout plan, they're talking about recovery. Everybody, everybody that hears me speak, they want to go straight to recovery. Workout first.

• 24:47David Goggins?

  Workout first before you talk to me about recovery.

• 24:49Lewis Howes?

  How to recover, yeah.

• 24:51David Goggins?

  Workout first. We are always looking for like whenever I talk to people, people take my words and they, and they, and they put it in a way to where they want to feel comfortable. This guy, you know, they, they, they want to put you in a box. They want to put a title on you. No, you're putting a title on me to make yourself feel better about yourself. If you read this book of mine and you see where I came from, this person was, this, this person was not built. This this this this person was not made by God. This person, sorry, this person was built. I made this person. I made this person by diving in to the insecurities that life gave me.

• 25:31David Goggins?

  Cause now they're yours. They're yours to own. If you're not smart, call yourself dumb. It's okay, cause you are. But take that, now as you put yourself down, if you're fat, call yourself fat. I used to be three hundred pounds. We we wanna talk so soft to ourselves, we're looking for that recovery day. And that recovery day is everything in your life. Everything in your life is a recovery day. We're looking for it. It's not coming. It's not coming. Get over that recovery day. And that's the mentality I took with me. And what happened through that process was all the frivolous things of life started to float away. I had to tell people lies so they would like me.

• 26:14David Goggins?

  Cause I was so insecure. When you start to build yourself up, and start to have, the one thing that we don't have is confidence. Real, authentic confidence from hard work. Everything else goes away. You you no longer look to other people for your self-esteem.

• 26:31Lewis Howes?

  For validation, for yeah.

• 26:33David Goggins?

  You now know. I walk in a room now and I know the hours and years and decades I put into David Goggins. That's something, it's not on the wall. It's not a trophy on the wall. It's not a medal on your neck. It is actually a feeling in your heart. And people go, why don't you ever smile? I don't have to.

• 26:53David Goggins?

  Yeah, I do have a stoic look on my face. I'm a I'm a very focused person. But the feeling I have in my soul and in my heart, that's why I don't need to smile. I don't need to smile. I don't need you to look at me and say, oh my God, you look happy. Cause half of us aren't happy. We're we're giving you something that we think you wanna see. I don't do that anymore. I don't care how you perceive David Goggins. Because through my journey, I figured out the one piece I was missing. I thought it was cars. I thought it was women. I thought it was, I thought it was money. I thought it was everything. The one piece I was missing was me having the courage to face myself. And once you do that on a daily basis, it's not about the running. Where people's gonna be, you're just not working out. Where I got my work ethic from?

• 27:40David Goggins?

  Was the hours I had to spend learning this. When you sit down and you're not smart. You have a disability.

• 27:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 27:49David Goggins?

  And you still wanna be at the top of your class. I didn't wanna just get by. When I realized that I can learn through hard work. And I can beat the valid Victorian in the school, but I got put in ten hours more a day than he does. You know what kinda strength comes from that? When you're sitting down that guy that that valid Victorian's standing for an hour and you know, I caught you. I caught you and I am dumb. But I have the work ethic to catch you. That's where David Gaga's got really invented.

• 28:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 28:21David Goggins?

  Was at a kitchen table with twenty spiral notebooks that were empty. And then three months later.

• 28:28Lewis Howes?

  Down, yeah.

• 28:29David Goggins?

  They were full. And when you can go through that, I still have them in my storage unit. You go through these spiral notebooks of your life. And you were like, this is how I learned. This is unbelievable. There's no miles. It's not about the miles. It's that. Having a discipline every day to say for me to learn this one math problem. It's gonna take me ten hours.

• 28:48Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 28:50David Goggins?

  And that's where it, and you realize through hard work. You can do, you can outwork anybody.

• 28:57Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:57David Goggins?

  No matter how badass they are. But that's the part people don't wanna dive into.

• 29:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. When someone's lacking confidence in themselves.

• 29:05David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 29:05Lewis Howes?

  What's the answer you would give them if they're like, how do I gain more confidence?

• 29:09David Goggins?

  It starts with yourself, man. You gotta start diving into those things that you are afraid of. You don't gain confidence by going to the spot that makes you feel good. It's could be a false reality. And the second life gives you that challenge. All you wanna do is go back to what made you confidence or, or, or, or what gave you confidence is that happy spot. No. What gives you confidence, what gave me confidence was spending years at a kitchen table. Trying to learn how to read and write on my own. Realizing I can't learn the way you learn.

• 29:44Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 29:45David Goggins?

  I can't. But I can learn. What gives you confidence is not being afraid. It's overcoming the fear. I used to stutter severely bad, so right now, I don't know how many people are gonna watch this. You know what gives me confidence? Is knowing I no longer care. If I sit and start stuttering to you.

• 30:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:04David Goggins?

  That's what gives me confidence, is facing these things, overcoming them. And maybe not overcoming them every day. But facing them. And facing them, and facing them, pretty soon like this, you know what, man, this is where it's at. It's not in that comfort zone. It's in the discomfort zone. Is where my confidence is getting built. That's where it's getting built. But people wanna, they wanna easier answer.

• 30:27Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 30:28David Goggins?

  There has to be an easier way. There's not. I'm sorry, I searched for it my entire life.

• 30:34Lewis Howes?

  You cheated, you lied.

• 30:35David Goggins?

  I lied, I did everything. And I still felt empty. I coach a lot of people nowadays, billionaires. Who call me on the phone and say, man, I'm still missing something. It's because. They did what they were good at.

• 30:52David Goggins?

  And they have this beautiful family. Two, three houses, cars, everything. Has everything to work, on the outside looking in, like, my God, man, how can you be unhappy? I walk around with the backpack with all my stuff in it, with no car.

• 31:05Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 31:06David Goggins?

  And I walk around. Happy as person in the world. Have nothing. Happy as hell. It's because. I found out the whole key to life. It's not in all that. You have to face yourself. So many people live to be a hundred years old. And they die miserable, having everything. Because they never examined, I call it my live autopsy. You never examine this. Happiness, peace. Enlightenment, it's all up here, man. It's all up here. If I start talking like this, people will, man, you know, I don't know, it's the truth, man.

• 31:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it is true.

• 31:45David Goggins?

  It's all up here. You just gotta be willing to go and face it. And that's the hard part.

• 31:50Lewis Howes?

  What's your biggest insecurity today?

• 31:54David Goggins?

  I'm not to be arrogant, I don't have one.

• 31:57Lewis Howes?

  What was the last one you had and when was that?

• 32:00David Goggins?

  The last one I had was probably um.

• 32:06David Goggins?

  Still me. Me, still living, cuz I I always talk about I I pay rent, so we live, we used to live in a seven dollar a month place when I was growing up.

• 32:16Lewis Howes?

  This is in Buffalo or is this?

• 32:17David Goggins?

  This is in Indiana.

• 32:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 32:18David Goggins?

  So like we had a lot of money in Buffalo.

• 32:21Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:21David Goggins?

  And when my mom left, my dad, we went to nothing for a period of time before she got on her feet.

• 32:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 32:27David Goggins?

  And that seven dollar a month place used to be. It was my, it was who I was. I was no one, I was in the sewer, my mom was in there, I had nothing. And you always feel like you have nothing, I had I achieved so much. I was a Navy SEAL, I've gone through Ranger School, I've gone through Delta Force Selection Training, I I I done so much, I I run two hundred miles, pull up records. Everything. Learned to read and write, became pretty intelligent. And I still was like, man, what is wrong with me? It wasn't until I got real sick, and I talked about in the last chapter of that book, I got real sick. And I was about um thirty eight years old.

• 33:10Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:10David Goggins?

  I'm forty three now. And my life got real quiet. I I went from running two hundred and five miles and thirty nine hours to I couldn't get out of bed. The doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, but once again, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.

• 33:25Lewis Howes?

  What's that?

• 33:26David Goggins?

  In that moment where my whole life changed. I went from a guy who worked out every day, trained every day, to a guy who couldn't get out of bed, my life was taken from me. The one thing that kept me going was my training.

• 33:39Lewis Howes?

  Now you didn't have that.

• 33:40David Goggins?

  I didn't have anything.

• 33:41Lewis Howes?

  Now you just had to sit alone.

• 33:42David Goggins?

  Alone.

• 33:42Lewis Howes?

  And not train.

• 33:44David Goggins?

  And that's what changed me, and that's when I realized. I hadn't thought, hadn't taken time to think about what I'd done in my life.

• 33:53Lewis Howes?

  You hadn't reflected yet.

• 33:54David Goggins?

  I hadn't reflected. I'd done all these things, but there was no finish line. I still believe that, but you must have time to reflect.

• 34:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:01David Goggins?

  I was just going. I wouldn't even, I'd finish a race of life and I wouldn't even receive my medal. I'd go on.

• 34:07Lewis Howes?

  You're like on to the next.

• 34:08David Goggins?

  I'd get in the car and I'd go.

• 34:10Lewis Howes?

  You wouldn't even take the medal?

• 34:11David Goggins?

  Gone. Don't care about it.

• 34:12Lewis Howes?

  Like I'm not gonna waste an hour sitting around for this ceremony?

• 34:14David Goggins?

  Most people sit around and that's what they like. They, they need the ceremony if I accomplish something.

• 34:20Lewis Howes?

  Validation.

• 34:20David Goggins?

  I haven't done anything. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.

• 34:23Lewis Howes?

  I'm just getting started.

• 34:24David Goggins?

  I'm just getting started. That's right. When I started figuring out life, that I was leaving so much in the tank, I call it my forty percent rule.

• 34:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:31David Goggins?

  I was leaving so much in the tank. Once I realized, my God, man, I was this dumb, fat kid being bullied and now I'm a hundred and eighty pound person who lost a hundred and six pounds in less than three months. Learned to read, learned to do this, learned to do that. I was like, I need more.

• 34:46Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:46David Goggins?

  I was fueling my mind with everything. And I never took time to say, my God, you came from this hell and you're here. So those insecurities, and this is how I explain it the best way. SEAL training became pretty hard and a lot of guys weren't getting through it. So they designed a SEAL pep prep program.

• 35:07Lewis Howes?

  Hmm. Like a boot camp for the boot camp.

• 35:09David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 35:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 35:09David Goggins?

  And it was two months. In my last two years before I retired from the military, they sent me there to train these kids.

• 35:16Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 35:16David Goggins?

  To get ready for BUDs.

• 35:17Lewis Howes?

  Eighteen, nineteen, twenty years.

• 35:18David Goggins?

  Young kids. So when they get to Navy SEAL training, man, they were physical studs.

• 35:24David Goggins?

  They were running, swimming. I mean, they were, they were hybrids.

• 35:27Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 35:28David Goggins?

  But they get to BUDs and the same amount of people would quit.

• 35:33Lewis Howes?

  Why is that?

• 35:34David Goggins?

  This is why.

• 35:37David Goggins?

  We were training bigger, stronger, faster quitters.

• 35:40Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 35:42David Goggins?

  It's not about.

• 35:43Lewis Howes?

  Not the mind.

• 35:43David Goggins?

  That's right. We weren't diving into the sewer. Everybody's got a story.

• 35:49David Goggins?

  We don't share it on social media. We share our nice life on social media. We have, we all have a dungeon. I'm just willing to talk about mine. Yeah. Most of us aren't willing to talk about it. I'm gonna talk about my dungeon. I wasn't getting into the dungeon of these guys' minds. I wasn't building that so-called mental toughness. Mental toughness isn't something that you sample. It's something that you live in every day. So when something hard would happen to these kids, like in Hell Week, it would draw on something that made them very insecure. And they look for comfort. Whenever hardness comes, and you don't know what it is. It may be different for you than it is for me. But you go back to your insecurities.

• 36:35David Goggins?

  And then when you go back to insecurities, you then look for comfort within those insecurities. And we all look for that cookie that your mom used to give you Right. when you were sad. Yeah. when you were sick. We look for our wife or our husband. We look for comfort. It's in those moments. You must retrain your mind Hmm. to think differently in hell. I wasn't training them to do that. Why weren't you training them? I wasn't training myself to that, because at that time, I would do what I was told. Hmm. These guys need to meet a standard. Physical standard. A physical standard. The physical standard is not what they need to meet. It's a mental standard you must meet in life. So going back to when I was sick,

• 37:20David Goggins?

  I was hitting the physical standards. I wasn't meeting the mental standard. The mental standard is you must know how far you've come. Wow. I wasn't, I, I had come eight thousand miles from where I started. But if you never know that, you're still in a seven-dollar-a-month place. When I was sick, I was able to slow it down and reflect back on my entire life. And in that bed, and I thought I was dying, because that story is long, that, that sick portion of my life is long.

• 37:58David Goggins?

  I didn't care if I died or lived. Cause I was for the first time in my life, happy. And at peace, cause I reflected back on where I started.

• 38:07Lewis Howes?

  You said, wow, I have come a long way.

• 38:08David Goggins?

  That's right, and no one saved me. It wasn't like someone came down here and guided me through life. When you figure this out on your own. The amount of pride and dignity and self-respect you have. That's why I walk around the streets. With a backpack and just like, I don't need anything else. You figure it out by going inside yourself, by callusing over the victim's mentality. You're always a victim, even if you have everything in life, until you realize what you've achieved. You have to first realize what you've achieved, and my mom has accomplished so much in her life since my father. But she hasn't done that one step.

• 38:51Lewis Howes?

  Really? She doesn't acknowledge it and reflect back?

• 38:54David Goggins?

  She continues to go back to the dungeon of her past life.

• 38:58Lewis Howes?

  And live in that space?

• 38:59David Goggins?

  And live in that space versus living the space that she's in now and reflecting back on, my god. This is what I've done with my life. So.

• 39:08Lewis Howes?

  Have you talked to her about this?

• 39:10David Goggins?

  We talk about it all the time, and you have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to really go there, not, not surface. I don't, I don't live on the surface of anything. Surface is what got me where I was at. It got me from a hundred and seventy-five pounds to three hundred pounds. Tell everybody I'm good. I don't, I don't give a damn. I'm good. No, they're, they're hollow words. A lot of us speak in hollow words. I used to speak in hollow words. I don't do anymore. Everything that comes out of my mouth has substance, is real, and. We all have these feelings in our bodies, in our minds, in our souls. I act on mine. A lot of us who are afraid of something, we allow our minds to choose the path of least resistance, so we go a different route.

• 39:56David Goggins?

  When I'm afraid of something, it's telling me you must. You must do that. You have to go that way, and most of us don't understand that mentality. We go left and we wonder why we haven't fulfilled something in our lives. It's because we continue to take the journey that is mapped out. And how I look at it is I, I, I talk in life like.

• 40:21David Goggins?

  A lot of us in life wanna take the four lane highway. That has road maps and all this other stuff on it, man. Tells you where to go, gas stations. The next ten miles up, you're gonna see a McDonald's or Cracker Barrel.

• 40:32Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 40:33David Goggins?

  It's the easy route. Very few of us wanna go to the right side.

• 40:36Lewis Howes?

  That Cracker Barrel's that Midwest life.

• 40:38David Goggins?

  That's right, that's right.

• 40:39Lewis Howes?

  I'm from Ohio.

• 40:40David Goggins?

  It's all about it, man. Indiana, Cracker Barrel everywhere.

• 40:44Lewis Howes?

  Dude, that's amazing. Bringing back memories.

• 40:48Lewis Howes?

  This is powerful, cuz I've been telling people this. I've been living that way unknowingly my whole life of like, whatever the thing is I'm afraid of. When I was in high school, I started doing those things.

• 40:58David Goggins?

  Right.

• 40:59Lewis Howes?

  And it was just like, I'm sick and tired of feeling afraid.

• 41:01David Goggins?

  Right.

• 41:02Lewis Howes?

  So I need to do the things that scare me the most.

• 41:04David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 41:05Lewis Howes?

  You know, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. Tiffany's heard me share these stories, but I was afraid to talk to girls when I was a teenager. I was afraid of dancing. I was afraid of like singing and playing music in front of people. I was afraid of all these different things. And so I said, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna give myself a challenge every single day until the fear goes away.

• 41:22David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 41:23Lewis Howes?

  And I feel like that's what more of us should be doing. I'm hearing that that's what you, how you live your life.

• 41:27David Goggins?

  That's all it is, man.

• 41:29Lewis Howes?

  And it helps me feel so much more confident. When you overcome that fear of saying this doesn't have control over me anymore.

• 41:34David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 41:35Lewis Howes?

  It's like you can get such more peace.

• 41:37David Goggins?

  It's a hundred percent. Most of, like, for instance, I never thought in my wildest dreams I could be a Navy SEAL. It's until you opened your mind, open mindedness creates that. We all shut down our mind. Like, for instance, when I broke the pull-up record. Everybody around me who heard the pull-up record was four thousand and twenty pull-ups. That's the first thing they did. Oh, my God.

• 41:59Lewis Howes?

  Four thousand in twenty-four hours?

• 42:01David Goggins?

  Yeah, it's four thousand twenty pull-ups in twenty-four hour period.

• 42:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:04David Goggins?

  The first thing I did versus closing my mind to like, oh, my God, that's crazy. I went and got a pin.

• 42:11Lewis Howes?

  And say, how many is that every minute?

• 42:12David Goggins?

  Exactly.

• 42:13Lewis Howes?

  Every hour, every second.

• 42:14David Goggins?

  Instead of taking life and making it out to be this grandiose thing, start breaking it down. Start breaking it down. And most of us, we live in a box. And we don't wanna go outside that box at all, ever. Outside that box is all these possibilities of life. What we do is we shackle our mind. We are a prisoner in our own mind that this is all I can do. This is all I'm good at. And we we we take away the possibility of you could be this, you could be that.

• 42:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:47David Goggins?

  You could be all these things. And I never thought at three hundred pounds I could be Navy SEAL.

• 42:51Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 42:52David Goggins?

  So if my mind was shackled, me and you would never meet. There'd be no book.

• 42:57Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 42:58David Goggins?

  There'd be no book.

• 42:59Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 43:00David Goggins?

  There'd be nothing. So what people understand is that they live for themselves, not knowing that you have the power within yourself to change millions of lives.

• 43:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 43:12David Goggins?

  By facing life, by facing yourself. And through that, I I would die never knowing that I had the power to change millions of lives. It will haunt me the most. People ask me, what what haunts you the most? What haunts me the most is that if I would have died at three hundred pounds, let's say I was seventy five years old. I got to heaven and God has a chart like that on everybody's life. God knows all, let's say that. I don't care what you believe in, doesn't matter. I'm not judging anybody. But let's say my thing is God. You get to heaven, I'm three hundred pounds, I sit down, I was a cockroach, terminated my whole life. And we're sitting down just like this, you're God and I'm David. And he gives me that chart. And he says, look at this.

• 43:55David Goggins?

  Now, look at this chart and on the chart it has all these different things, but my name's on it. But these things aren't me. I was gonna change the world. I was gonna, I was gonna set records. I was gonna be a Navy SEAL. I was gonna be all these things in the military that I accomplished. You're gonna get the VFW award. You're gonna be honored here, honored there. And I'm like, God, I was, this isn't me. Like it says, David Goggins. I was an Ecolab guy, sprayed for cockroaches and I'm three hundred pounds. Instead, here I'm one eighty five.

• 44:26David Goggins?

  It says here I got a a bachelor's and a master's. It says all these things.

• 44:32David Goggins?

  And God goes, no, that's who you were supposed to be.

• 44:35Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 44:37David Goggins?

  My biggest fear in life is if there is a final resting place in this world and there's a final judgment. And you talk to something much bigger than you. I don't wanna sit down and have a conversation with someone with something that says, you're in heaven. This is what you should have been on earth. And are you really in heaven now or are you in hell?

• 45:00Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 45:01David Goggins?

  Thinking about how much I left on the table for fear. For not willing to go over the wall and over the next wall and over the next wall. So in my mind, I believe that and God knows all, at least I believe that.

• 45:17David Goggins?

  I want God to be up there right now as we're speaking, writing stuff down, saying, my God, he exceeded even my expectations. That's how I live my life. I now know that there is no cap on the human mind. There's no cap. We cap it ourselves.

• 45:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Is there a cap on the human body?

• 45:39David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 45:40Lewis Howes?

  Is there one?

• 45:40David Goggins?

  There. I.

• 45:45David Goggins?

  I don't believe so.

• 45:46Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:48David Goggins?

  Because one thing I found out was I didn't, for several years, I gave myself a way out.

• 45:55Lewis Howes?

  When you were three hundred pounds?

• 45:56David Goggins?

  No, I was three hundred pounds when I was, all the way up to I was twenty four years old. I would climb a mountain, I'd fall back down. I'd start climbing, I'd fall back down for the first twenty four years of my life. I went to my first hell week, my second hell week, and then my third hell week came in SEAL training. And the CO, Captain Bowen, looked at me, I'm on crutches, I'm all jacked up. He says, hey, this is your last time you're gonna go through, Bud's. Zip.

• 46:24David Goggins?

  I had several stress fractures. I had double pneumonia, I was jacked up, and he gave me a few months to heal. He said, this is your last time going through. I shouldn't even let you go back through.

• 46:34Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 46:35David Goggins?

  I started Navy SEAL training with stress fractures.

• 46:40David Goggins?

  Stress fractures, not shin splints.

• 46:41Lewis Howes?

  That's hard to finish.

• 46:42David Goggins?

  Stress fractures, starting the hardest training, arguably the hardest training in the world with stress fractures.

• 46:48David Goggins?

  And this is when I started to not put a cap on the body. If the mind is there. Every morning I would wake up at three thirty morning, four o'clock in the morning, go to my dive cage. Go in there before anybody saw me. I'd get duct tape and I would tape from my forefoot all the way up to the middle of my calf. And I would put two black socks on. And so I ran not using the pivot.

• 47:12Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 47:14David Goggins?

  And I ran my hip flexors. So for the first forty five minutes to an hour, I was in absolute excruciating pain. But what motivated me through that whole process?

• 47:26David Goggins?

  Was the fact that this kid came from that. I'm in the hardest training in the world, in the worst shape of my entire life. What if I can graduate amongst these studs?

• 47:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 47:41David Goggins?

  All these guys around me are studs. They're stallions, they're gladiators in my class. They're all healthy, most of them. They're not broken like this. They may have some, you know, everybody's sick going through that training. But if I could graduate, it would change everything for me. If I can start the hardest training in the world, broken, and graduate. So my mind fed off of that. You are now from the weakest man, you are now the hardest man to ever live. If you can do this. If you can do this. Life is one big mind game.

• 48:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:18David Goggins?

  And you're playing it with yourself. Is it true? I don't care. It got me through the hardest training, starting out broken.

• 48:26Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 48:27David Goggins?

  Where most people quit, I had just started.

• 48:30Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 48:31David Goggins?

  And when you take that mindset and you learn to flip that around.

• 48:36David Goggins?

  That's what made me powerful. And my body followed. And three months later, my stress fractures were healed by running on them.

• 48:48Lewis Howes?

  Calcifying it, just like.

• 48:50David Goggins?

  I never had him since, I'm forty-three years old.

• 48:52Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 48:53David Goggins?

  I ran seven thousand miles in two thousand and seven, haven't had a stress fracture since. And I'm not saying to do that. I'm just saying that when the mind and the body connect. And you didn't, and you don't give yourself a way out. The only way out for me at that time was death.

• 49:10Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 49:11David Goggins?

  I'm gonna be a Navy SEAL.

• 49:13Lewis Howes?

  Or I'm gonna die.

• 49:14David Goggins?

  Or I'm gonna die trying.

• 49:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 49:17David Goggins?

  Period. And my body said, Roger that.

• 49:21David Goggins?

  We're gonna get you through this.

• 49:23Lewis Howes?

  So when the mind gives it no way out.

• 49:25David Goggins?

  No way out.

• 49:26Lewis Howes?

  Your body says, okay.

• 49:27David Goggins?

  Okay.

• 49:28Lewis Howes?

  I believe you now.

• 49:29David Goggins?

  I have to heal.

• 49:30Lewis Howes?

  I'm gonna figure this out with you.

• 49:31David Goggins?

  Yes.

• 49:31Lewis Howes?

  Do this, it's gonna be the, the worst part of your life. But we're gonna, you're gonna survive.

• 49:36David Goggins?

  We're gonna survive.

• 49:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 49:38David Goggins?

  And as you hear in that hundred mile race I did, I started figuring out more and more and more and more about at the other end of suffering. Is a life that no one, and I'm not talking about go out there and kill yourself. Don't take these words and flip them and say, oh, my God, no. It just be uncomfortable. I call it suffering.

• 49:59Lewis Howes?

  Physically injure yourself.

• 50:00David Goggins?

  Yes, not saying that.

• 50:02Lewis Howes?

  And then be out for six months.

• 50:03David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 50:03Lewis Howes?

  That's no good.

• 50:04David Goggins?

  That's no good. I'm not saying, I'm not saying do what I did.

• 50:07Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 50:07David Goggins?

  I was in a spot that life forced me. I had a choice. I had a choice to be this guy or the guy that's in front of you. I had choices. I chose this path.

• 50:18Lewis Howes?

  And you're still choosing it.

• 50:19David Goggins?

  I'm still choosing.

• 50:19Lewis Howes?

  You can go back to that guy any moment.

• 50:21David Goggins?

  Cause I found out. I found out something with those stress fractures. I found out something through facing all these things. I found out a whole nother world. Which is why I walk around with all my stuff in a black backpack.

• 50:35Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 50:36David Goggins?

  I found a whole nother way. A whole nother way of. No matter how far you get in life. You have to be able to go back to scratch in your mind at a moment's notice. You can never get so far beyond scratch. What that means is when you accomplish something in life, if you want to go back to scratch and go back to that seven dollar a month place where I once lived and visit that place for a long period of time. If you were here when you went back to scratch, you would now be here. Scratch is what makes you better. Scratch, friction, obstacles create growth. There's no friction when you're this far up in the game anymore.

• 51:20David Goggins?

  You think there is, that's right. When you achieve so much, the friction is is is minor. Cause why? I'm sore. I'm gonna get a massage today. I'm hungry. I'm gonna eat today. The refrigerator is always full. So your comforts are now, so your discomfort is now very miniscule to your discomfort back here in the seven dollar a month place. So you have to go back to the total discomfort to then raise your level of where you're at now. I'm not saying stay there and stay there. Visit.

• 51:53Lewis Howes?

  Visit it.

• 51:54David Goggins?

  And then you raise your level.

• 51:56Lewis Howes?

  Take a day trip.

• 51:57David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 51:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 51:57David Goggins?

  Always take day trips.

• 51:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Don't stay there.

• 52:00David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 52:01Lewis Howes?

  But take a day trip.

• 52:02David Goggins?

  Take a day trip.

• 52:03Lewis Howes?

  So when you complete some massive obstacle and challenge, whatever the adversity that you force upon yourself. Cause these are all curated experiences for yourself that you're scratching constantly. What happens now, since this was five years ago, you would just leave, you want to take the medal, you would just go on to the next. What happens now? Do you take, you know, a day to reflect, a moment, 10 minutes? Like, how does the process work? And then how do you get back to visiting the seven dollar, uh, you know, place you lived in?

• 52:33David Goggins?

  Now, I don't have to go back and visit it. I don't have to think about it. It lives with me now.

• 52:40David Goggins?

  Every day of my damn life, that feeling that I had to go back and think about, I found a way, this habit.

• 52:49David Goggins?

  How did you? It's constantly there. I have a self-talk. I have a self-talk. It's called my cookie jar. It's a constant reminder of David Gatt. Every day of my life, I believe in quiet. There's no growth outside of quiet. The, the world's too noisy. Your mind needs quiet for you to find who you are. People ask, what's my purpose? Why am I here? You're not gonna find it nowadays unless you lock yourself in a quiet room in your mind and find it. It's too noisy. For me, I could be in a busy street in New York City, horns honking, and I'm walking around with like, nothing. It's me and myself in a quiet spot.

• 53:34David Goggins?

  And when you are constantly reflecting on who you are, where you've been, the journey you've gone through, the journey you could continue going through, the feeling's always there. You don't allow the world to pull you so fast that you forget. You don't allow yourself to pull you so fast that you forget. It's not about staying in that moment. It's about, you wanna get to the point where that feeling follows you like breathing. Because a part of your life, a part of your DNA. But it's made, like these calluses on my hands right now, they're made. They are now on my brain. This is now a part of me.

• 54:15David Goggins?

  It's a daily process, a part of me. And how I go back to a seven dollar amount of place all the time is now I go out and I dig fire line. I'm a wildland firefighter. I don't need to do it. I'm a forty-three-year-old man. I, I work with twenty-seven-year-old kids. I'm a rookie. Every day I'm a rookie, it feels like. And- Why do you do it? That's why I do it, man. There's a story I'm gonna tell you about why I do it. So I make, I have a good living now, for me, where I'm at in my life.

• 54:48David Goggins?

  I was out on a fire in Colorado. And we were digging a fire line on this like fifty percent like it was like on the side of a daggon uh mountain.

• 54:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 54:57David Goggins?

  And we're trying to keep the fire from moving and we're digging this fire line fourteen inches or my fault eighteen inches wide. Three miles long, twelve of us digging. And it is the hardest work. You make twelve dollars an hour.

• 55:10Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 55:11David Goggins?

  Nothing. You set up your shop like when you're done digging, you just pretty much lay down, you go to sleep and you get up, you dig some more.

• 55:18Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 55:18David Goggins?

  It happens for two weeks long.

• 55:20Lewis Howes?

  What are you digging? It's like a hole?

• 55:21David Goggins?

  So you're so you're trying to get down to to a mineral source. So you're trying to get down to the to the earth. So so that if that fire is moving, it can't burn dirt.

• 55:31Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 55:31David Goggins?

  So you're moving fuels.

• 55:32Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 55:33David Goggins?

  You're you know, so so not only are you digging, you're cutting down trees. It's hard work. But the moral of the story is I'm forty three. Don't need to do it at all. This is why I do it.

• 55:42Lewis Howes?

  You're making money.

• 55:42David Goggins?

  I'm making money. I I I I have a good life. I don't need to do it. And everybody asks me why I do it. This is why. This twenty one year old kid was out there. And he wanted a pair of running shoes. So all he wanted was a pair of running shoes. Sixty, seventy, hundred bucks, whatever, you know, easy for us.

• 56:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 56:04David Goggins?

  Running shoes. He looked up at the mountain. That we had been on for days digging this fire line. And he said that'd take me five or six hours of work to buy those shoes. Said I'm not gonna buy them. It's the perspective of life. That perspective of life right there. Of that is the value that we lose. When things start to come so easy in life. It's the perspective that twenty one year old had. He looked up at that mountain and thought. He looked at his hands. He looked at the at the amount of hours of pulling that Pulaski, that that tool and raking that ground. And and then cutting those trees and moving them and that hours of work. He looked at his feet and said, these old shoes would do.

• 56:50David Goggins?

  It's that perspective in life that we lose. And that's that story that most people may not mean anything. It's that story I always wanna have in my life. You cannot lose perspective of where you've come in life.

• 57:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. So true. We were in Guatemala, was it this year or last year? Last year, we were in Guatemala last year. We we support a charity called Pencil of Promise that builds schools for kids who live in poverty and all around the world. And every year I take a trip to just see where our efforts are being, you know, felt and being and being made. And these are the poorest places in Guatemala, Laos, and Ghana, places that they have nothing. There's no schools, they're little villages, they live on dirt, huts, everything, right? And we go and we build these schools. We actually, the the villagers build them themselves. We just fund the experience and they empower, we empower them to do it. Um, so that they take ownership of it.

• 57:48David Goggins?

  Right.

• 57:49Lewis Howes?

  But I'll be there for a few days and watch these kids so happy with just like a pencil.

• 57:53David Goggins?

  Right.

• 57:53Lewis Howes?

  Just so happy to just like have their family around and they'll go and they'll show us their huts and like they're just so happy to have community. And then I'll fly back and go through Beverly Hills.

• 58:06David Goggins?

  Yep.

• 58:06Lewis Howes?

  Right over here and I'll see like these mansions, you know, I live right next to it. And I'm just like, it gives me so much perspective of like, you don't need to have all these things.

• 58:16David Goggins?

  No.

• 58:16Lewis Howes?

  To find peace and joy and and connection and intimacy and all these and all these other things that we want. You don't need these big.

• 58:24David Goggins?

  No.

• 58:24Lewis Howes?

  Mansions and to live in this nice place. You know, I like living here, but it's not like. It's perspective for me is what keeps me motivated as well.

• 58:32David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 58:33Lewis Howes?

  To to keep doing the right things, to keep showing up, keep working hard.

• 58:36David Goggins?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:37Lewis Howes?

  And I think it's right. Most of us miss that perspective in life.

• 58:40David Goggins?

  We get so far away from reality.

• 58:42Lewis Howes?

  So far.

• 58:43David Goggins?

  And the reality is, man, when I was seven years old, eight years old, all I wanted was a ninety nine cent quarter pounder from Hardee's.

• 58:50Lewis Howes?

  I know, right?

• 58:51David Goggins?

  And that made me happy as hell.

• 58:53Lewis Howes?

  Some curly fries.

• 58:54David Goggins?

  That's it, man. That's it.

• 58:57Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, the thing is, a lot of us have been conditioned, or some of us grew up with wealth, or grew up with comfort.

• 59:04David Goggins?

  Right.

• 59:05Lewis Howes?

  So we're conditioned that way, and we grew up expecting now that things should come a lot easier.

• 59:09David Goggins?

  Right. That's a damn shame.

• 59:11Lewis Howes?

  And we get frustrated when we don't get it right.

• 59:14David Goggins?

  That's right, quickly.

• 59:15Lewis Howes?

  Quickly.

• 59:16David Goggins?

  Yes.

• 59:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and I'm always talking about delayed gratification. Like, the longer I can wait to receive gratification.

• 59:22David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 59:23Lewis Howes?

  The more fulfilled I am.

• 59:24David Goggins?

  I'm a person, so when I got sick like I did, I actually had to quit this race called Badwater.

• 59:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, 135 miles.

• 59:32David Goggins?

  Yep, through Death Valley. It was 2014, I got real, real bad. I pulled out of the race at mile 50, I went to the emergency room, and the docs were like, you know, "We can't find this, we can't find that, we know what's wrong with you." When I got in that bed, so this is the crazy thing about gratification, long-term. I'm able to watch grass grow by finding out this. I sat there, couldn't run a half, a quarter mile, couldn't get out of bed. The only thought I had in my mind, I pulled out of that race, I told myself, "I'm gonna go back to Badwater one day and rent it. I'm gonna win the race." Haven't been back since. Haven't been back since 2019.

• 1:00:17David Goggins?

  I'm not saying I'm gonna win it, I'm just now in the shape to go back.

• 1:00:20Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:00:21David Goggins?

  Haven't run a 100-mile race since 2014.

• 1:00:23Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:00:24David Goggins?

  Because I've been that sick. I'm just now, imagine the gratification I'm gonna get by getting to the start line of that race, and what if I can win it?

• 1:00:33Lewis Howes?

  Be pretty sweet.

• 1:00:34David Goggins?

  Pretty sweet.

• 1:00:35Lewis Howes?

  Four or five years, yeah.

• 1:00:36David Goggins?

  Imagine that. Of having that kind of self-discipline, every day wake up, and having these setbacks, where I can't even run a mile.

• 1:00:44Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:00:44David Goggins?

  But I'm thinking about running 135. I can't run one mile, but I'm thinking about running 135. And with that process, guess what happens? Sooner or later, you can run 10 miles. It may take a year, but it gives you more and more hope that it's possible. And I'm at the point now, where guess what? It's right around the corner.

• 1:01:06Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:01:07David Goggins?

  Most people in that timeframe, in that mindset, "I can't run anymore, it's over." Nah. This could take a little bit longer. You have to turn the negative into a positive.

• 1:01:20Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:21David Goggins?

  Cause at the end of it all, if you can sit back and wait, if you can wait six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 12 years. When you get to that point, when you finish, that's the feeling for 12 years. It's not that it takes 12 years to get there. That's what keeps you going is you got to feel, I want, I'm doing it for one second.

• 1:01:41Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:44Lewis Howes?

  Years of pain.

• 1:01:45David Goggins?

  For one second, one second.

• 1:01:51David Goggins?

  Think about it. You cross the finish line, it's over. One second.

• 1:01:56Lewis Howes?

  Most people do that and the one second isn't what they thought it would be. And then they're pissed and upset and they keep going on to the next because they never reflect back on what they did.

• 1:02:06David Goggins?

  It's not the one second, it's the 12 years.

• 1:02:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09David Goggins?

  It's the 12 years that I want. It's not the race.

• 1:02:14Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:15David Goggins?

  It's the 12 years why you did it.

• 1:02:19Lewis Howes?

  It's not the winning.

• 1:02:20David Goggins?

  It's not the winning.

• 1:02:20Lewis Howes?

  It's not what place you got.

• 1:02:21David Goggins?

  No.

• 1:02:22Lewis Howes?

  But most of us focus on.

• 1:02:23David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:02:24Lewis Howes?

  Oh, I gotta win this.

• 1:02:25David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:02:26Lewis Howes?

  If I don't, I'm gonna be upset. I would achieve all my athletic goals for years. And then 10 minutes later, be the angriest person in the world. So angry and frustrated, nasty with people.

• 1:02:36David Goggins?

  Yep.

• 1:02:36Lewis Howes?

  And I would delay my gratification for years to achieve what I wanted.

• 1:02:39David Goggins?

  That's right.

• 1:02:40Lewis Howes?

  And I never understood that either.

• 1:02:43David Goggins?

  Being a perfectionist is the worst thing that can happen to a person. You never live, like when I lost that 106 pounds in like two and a half months, whatever it took me. That was the biggest trophy of my entire life. I didn't care if I graduated Navy SEAL training. I didn't care. What I just accomplished in that timeframe, it's massive.

• 1:03:02Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03David Goggins?

  I don't know, there was no trainer, I, I, I, there was no like, it was funny about this, we talk about mental toughness nowadays. It's like the biggest crave. When I grew up, it was just suck it up.

• 1:03:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15David Goggins?

  It was just make it happen.

• 1:03:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18David Goggins?

  You had to figure out, it's, it's called figuring it out, man. And all these, all these nuggets that I gained along the way, that's what it was about. It wasn't about the trident. It wasn't about all those dead gone medals. It wasn't about any of that. And that's why I hate even talking about being a SEAL, you know? I miss the stories, people, why you talk about it didn't define me? The journey getting there was harder than going through it. You know, so that's the whole thing about life, man, it's that journey that that makes you who you are.

• 1:03:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, and as opposed to focusing on did I win or not?

• 1:03:51David Goggins?

  Right.

• 1:03:51Lewis Howes?

  What did I gain from the last 12 years?

• 1:03:53David Goggins?

  Right.

• 1:03:54Lewis Howes?

  And so when you finish now, what do you think about? How how long do you reflect back on the effort it took to accomplish that race or?

• 1:04:01David Goggins?

  A long time.

• 1:04:02Lewis Howes?

  What's?

• 1:04:03David Goggins?

  A long time, weeks, years.

• 1:04:05Lewis Howes?

  You'll reflect on it.

• 1:04:06David Goggins?

  I reflect back now, there's times now where I would reflect back on my first 100 mile race.

• 1:04:14Lewis Howes?

  Still today?

• 1:04:14David Goggins?

  Still today. And it'll give me the same exact feeling. Because what I did in that first race when I was under trained, I did it on four days notice. I hadn't run more than, I think, 20 miles the whole year. And I did it to raise money for this foundation. You know, to try to get in the bad water. What I had to pull out of myself on that last, that's where that book, Limit the Seal, kind of originated. Jesse Isler saw me at this race.

• 1:04:43Lewis Howes?

  He was racing too.

• 1:04:44David Goggins?

  Yeah, but he did it as a team.

• 1:04:46Lewis Howes?

  Right, you did it alone.

• 1:04:47David Goggins?

  I did it alone. And that's what I talk with people about, man. I spent so much time, people always like, why do you run so much, you know, you try to get in shape? No, the things I do in life, most of life, you're alone. You may have a whole support crew around you, but up here, you're alone. Most of the stuff I do, I'm training for that one, those moments. Those moments when I was at mile 70 and I had 30 more miles to go and I had, I crapped up my back and peeing blood down my leg, I had 30 miles to go. There's only so much someone cheering it can do for you.

• 1:05:22Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:05:23David Goggins?

  When you start to dive back in the cellar of your mind and you're pulling out all these, all these tactics, all these mental tactics to get through this 30 miles when you're in the worst shape of your life and no one's coming to save you and you get through that. I I wanna go back there like when I got done with that race, I laid in the tub. And my ex-wife helped me get up the stairs and I'm laying in this tub. And Coca-Cola is coming out of me.

• 1:05:51Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:52David Goggins?

  Just looks like dirt. And she was in, you know, she's a nurse and she's like, she's freaking out. And she puts the shower on me and I'm looking at her. And all I wanna do is call the race director up of Bowwar and say I qualified for the race. And she's thinking we gotta go to the hospital. So you know, she's she's calling my mom and my mom has a doctor friend of hers who's over. And they're freaking out. And I said, everybody just shut up.

• 1:06:17Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:06:18David Goggins?

  Shut up. I'm in the worst pain of my entire life and no one would ever understand this. No one. When you've gone that deep inside yourself. And all those feelings of pain that I had, I was in the worst pain of my life. Ever. And some people think, man, you're just crazy.

• 1:06:35David Goggins?

  No. When you've, when you've done that. And you've figured out so much on your own. And all that pain. And discomfort I had in that tub laying there, passing out, everything. Was confirmation of what I just figured out. I just figured out the code. I figured out a code. A code that many people aren't looking for.

• 1:07:02David Goggins?

  And I wanted to be numb. I I want that feeling. This was confirmation. This was like a scientist's notes.

• 1:07:08Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:09David Goggins?

  The notes were here. The notes were all this feeling. It was a confirmation. And no one at that time could understand what I'd just done. I cracked the code to human potential.

• 1:07:22Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:22David Goggins?

  In myself. And I was sitting like, oh, my God, like this is unbelievable what I just did. So it's that quiet place.

• 1:07:31Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:07:32David Goggins?

  It's that place by yourself. It's those hours. And years and decades by yourself. In the grip of life. When life has you by the throat and choking you out and you're sitting there calm. Because you're trying to figure it out. You're not panicking. You're not quitting. You're not throwing in the towel. You're saying there's a way around this. And when you figure it out, when life has you gripped in a vice. And you can figure that out.

• 1:08:01David Goggins?

  That's when you overcome. That's when you overcome. And that's why that one moment for me in that tub, I ain't want anyone to take away from me.

• 1:08:13Lewis Howes?

  This is crazy, man, I love this. Do you have any fears today?

• 1:08:19David Goggins?

  I do have a lot of fears today.

• 1:08:23David Goggins?

  But it's hard for me to call them fears anymore. I don't use that word anymore. They're almost like it's another challenge. Because anything that makes me feel that fear feeling is gonna get overcome.

• 1:08:36Lewis Howes?

  You go do it.

• 1:08:37David Goggins?

  It's gonna get conquered. It it that is, that's almost like fear is my ultimate guide.

• 1:08:43Lewis Howes?

  Of where you're supposed to be.

• 1:08:44David Goggins?

  Of where I'm supposed to be going. It's my ultimate guide.

• 1:08:48Lewis Howes?

  What's the big challenge then for you then?

• 1:08:50David Goggins?

  The biggest challenge for me is always going, I wanna be comfortable.

• 1:08:55Lewis Howes?

  You wanna be comfortable. You wanna sleep in a nice bed and relax.

• 1:08:59David Goggins?

  I'm a normal human being.

• 1:08:59Lewis Howes?

  You wanna chill out.

• 1:09:01David Goggins?

  I want, and and the time is gonna come. There's time for everybody to get civilized. The worst thing in life that happens to a man is they get civilized, or a woman, anybody. Cause you lose the hunger for life. You you you you think you've arrived, and once you have a I've arrived mentality, that's my biggest fear. Is I get to a point where I I'm at that point where life has come to me and I had that feeling of I've arrived. I now know my life for what I know it to be is over. Even though that's where comfort is and everything else, I found the most life in the most uncomfortable

• 1:09:40David Goggins?

  places in the world. I was the most David, the the the Goggins that I invented, cause David Goggins was weak.

• 1:09:50David Goggins?

  I never wanna get rid of Goggins. The guy I created, that weak person that that that used to be, the guy I created that can handle anything. You don't wanna let go of that guy because you realize that that guy was made. You weren't born him. And that is, when when you get comfortable, Goggins starts to die. He starts to die, that, that, that one creature from the Black Lagoon. That can live in a sewer, that can eat rats all day, that doesn't need water, that doesn't need sunlight, that doesn't need nothing. He can just live, cause he knows he can. That's a powerful human being that you never wanna, it's in everybody.

• 1:10:34David Goggins?

  That's the scary thing about, that's what makes me so upset, man. Is that everybody wants to put this daggone label on me. They forget the first three chapters of my book. They forget how this started. A lot of times, it takes someone's wife dying, or something like that, for them to change.

• 1:10:54Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, near death.

• 1:10:55David Goggins?

  Yeah, something, no, no, no, none of that. I wanted to figure out, is there more to this horrible feeling of feeling like a loser? Can I change this? And once you figure out, I have the ability, not through your mom, or your dad, or through a special school, through you. You have the ability to change this, that's what makes me so mad. Once people put this title on me, you now give yourself a get out of jail free card. They say, oh, he's just crazy, he's special, he's unique, he's this and that. You just saved yourself.

• 1:11:30Lewis Howes?

  From not having to do the work.

• 1:11:32David Goggins?

  Not having to do the work. And that's why I want people to hear my story. I'm trying to take away all that bull crap that you wanna put on me. I'm trying to make you suffer up here to know what my guy, man. He really had a hard way to go.

• 1:11:49Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 1:11:50David Goggins?

  There was nothing special about him, he wasn't talented, he wasn't gifted, he wasn't nothing. He wasn't nothing, and he made it. I want everybody to feel uncomfortable around me.

• 1:12:02David Goggins?

  That's it. Cause I want you to go home and think about yourself.

• 1:12:05Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06David Goggins?

  Think about yourself, man, because you're leaving so much on the table for the possibilities of what you can be.

• 1:12:12Lewis Howes?

  You say most people are at forty percent potential, what percent are you at?

• 1:12:17David Goggins?

  I like to say that I live in the ninety percentile, sometimes ninety-nine, a hundred percent is dead. A hundred percent is dead.

• 1:12:26Lewis Howes?

  Ninety-nine sometimes.

• 1:12:27David Goggins?

  Ninety-nine sometimes, the reason why I know ninety-nine, because.

• 1:12:31David Goggins?

  The first five hours of my day, I am very uncomfortable.

• 1:12:37Lewis Howes?

  What do you do?

• 1:12:39David Goggins?

  First of all, every morning I get up and people think I love to run. I don't.

• 1:12:44Lewis Howes?

  That's why you do it?

• 1:12:44David Goggins?

  That's why I do it and and people don't understand the mentality. Oh, you have to love it, man. No. Running has changed my life because every morning I know I'm gonna do it. If you know, every morning you do something you don't like. Every morning I would do it for, and guess what? If I just ran for an hour a day, a day is twenty four hours, right? What percent is that? What's one hour of twenty, what is that? Four percent?

• 1:13:08Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09David Goggins?

  A small percent. But anyway.

• 1:13:13David Goggins?

  That's why I know I'm at a a high level, cuz I'm at this. Not wanting to be this, you know, uncomfortable. I put myself in the dungeon every day off jump. Out of bed, it starts.

• 1:13:26Lewis Howes?

  Shoes on.

• 1:13:27David Goggins?

  Out of bed. While while most people lose the battle in the morning, like, once you leave your beautiful house. The war starts. Nowadays, it starts before you leave home. The phone rings, social media is up, the world is attacking you. If you don't control what you can to build that armor, so in the morning time, what I'm doing is I'm building my armor. It gets broken every night. I get up in the morning time, I start to build the armor, let's run, okay? Gotta do our pushes, our sits, our pull-ups, gotta go to the gym, gotta do our stretch. Every morning, I'm building.

• 1:13:59Lewis Howes?

  You do one hour in the morning of training?

• 1:14:01David Goggins?

  Oh, no. In the morning time, I do at least an hour and a half, and then I go to the gym.

• 1:14:05Lewis Howes?

  Of running, hour and a half? Hour and a half of running.

• 1:14:07David Goggins?

  Yes. Then I'm in the gym, and then at nighttime, every night, for the last five to six years, about five and a half years. I've only missed two days of stretching for two to three hours.

• 1:14:19Lewis Howes?

  Two to three hours at night, stretching?

• 1:14:21David Goggins?

  I've only missed two days in five or about five and a half years.

• 1:14:25Lewis Howes?

  Wow, stretching?

• 1:14:27David Goggins?

  Stretching.

• 1:14:27Lewis Howes?

  Why stretching?

• 1:14:29David Goggins?

  That is rough. So, the the sickness I had was my psoas muscle got real tight. And it caused my body, long story short, to pretty much choke me out from the inside. So, when you're young. Your psoas muscle is your fight or flight muscle. We're sitting down right now, we're using the hip flexor muscle.

• 1:14:48David Goggins?

  When you're under stress, as I was my whole life, by being afraid of my father.

• 1:14:51Lewis Howes?

  Tight.

• 1:14:51David Goggins?

  It's tight.

• 1:14:52Lewis Howes?

  Clenched.

• 1:14:52David Goggins?

  Your whole body's tight. Then I choose a job like being a Navy SEAL. It's even tighter. And then I put myself under stress. It's just tightening, tightening, tightening. It's a vise grip. And you need healthy blood flow through your body. I wasn't getting any of that. So I put so hard in, in life. People say, oh, cause you ran so much. No. Sorry. Life.

• 1:15:12Lewis Howes?

  Emotional stress.

• 1:15:13David Goggins?

  Yes, emotional stress made me just tight. So now, I couldn't sit down here for ten seconds. And I'd be like, I was wound. What that's done to me is allow me to be even open, even more open minded. I stretch out. I get my body lengthened out. It lengthens my mind out, the possibilities out. I calm myself down. So during the morning time, I build the armor. I face the world. Cause now I know there's gonna be some disappointments along the way, every day.

• 1:15:44Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44David Goggins?

  That's life. But if you face disappointments already in victory. The things I can control is I can control my run.

• 1:15:51Lewis Howes?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:52David Goggins?

  I can control how my house looks. How my, how my world is. I can control that. So I've won. Open my door of life. Life starts to beat me down, but I'm facing it with the body armor that I created.

• 1:16:03Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:16:04David Goggins?

  And now I'm facing life with, with, with the proper tools. Unlike, I hit this snooze button. I'm running late. My house is a mess. My mind's a mess. Now life's already beat you. So you open the door and now life hits you and you're already frustrated. You're already in that anxiety mode. You're stressed already. And then life starts to power more on top of you. You get home, you're exhausted. And that's how life happens to everyone. You have to live and win what you can and build the body armor. Start callousing the mind so you're ready for combat outside of your house. Cause it's gonna come. And that's what I realized at a young age. I had no body armor. I had no callus.

• 1:16:47Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:48David Goggins?

  So when life came at me, I, I ran. I tucked. I lived in the fetal position, trying to get away from life. I wasn't protected. I didn't protect myself. I had nothing. So I started realizing, I gotta form an armor. To, so I'm gonna have to lie to you to make you like me. So I'm not approaching people feeling insecure, saying I have all these material things I don't have. When you have that body armor, you tell people, hey man, I'm not real smart.

• 1:17:20David Goggins?

  But I try real hard. Not the fact, I I won't win this race, man, but I've been running for the last four years every day.

• 1:17:26Lewis Howes?

  That's pretty good, yeah.

• 1:17:28David Goggins?

  That's the, that's the mentality that you need to have. Look at people knowing, I know you and everybody else has issues. So why am I, why am I worried about how anybody thinks of me? We're all in the same boat here. Some boats may be bigger than others, but we all have problems.

• 1:17:49David Goggins?

  So be it. We're all in the same boat. Some of us are willing to not lie about it. I'm at that point now where I no longer care, cause why, why can I go on here and tell people how fucked up I am? Cause I faced them.

• 1:18:04David Goggins?

  Then they'll longer define who I am. It's not me. It was me.

• 1:18:08Lewis Howes?

  They don't control you anymore, yeah.

• 1:18:12Lewis Howes?

  When you're training in the morning or training at night, or stretching at night, what are you visualizing or thinking about?

• 1:18:19David Goggins?

  Nothing. When I'm training in the morning time.

• 1:18:23Lewis Howes?

  And it's a run for an hour and a half in the gym and.

• 1:18:25David Goggins?

  Sometimes it's longer.

• 1:18:26Lewis Howes?

  Calisthenic type stuff or.

• 1:18:28David Goggins?

  An hour to an hour and a half is, is the minimum. If I'm doing like a, like a hundred mile race, like, you know, like now I'm starting to build my miles back up, come training for a race in January. You know, that, that could be two, two and a half, three hours. Then once I come home from that, it's right in the gym, immediately. So I'm exhausted, I'm tired, I'm dehydrated. Sodium low, everything. And that's where, that's the edge.

• 1:18:52Lewis Howes?

  Cause it's even more uncomfortable to do that.

• 1:18:54David Goggins?

  That's right. Cause all I wanna do then.

• 1:18:56Lewis Howes?

  Stretch, drink water, relax.

• 1:18:58David Goggins?

  That's it. I had a long run, I'm hot, I'm dehydrated.

• 1:19:02Lewis Howes?

  You already didn't wanna run.

• 1:19:03David Goggins?

  That's right. So that's where, because why?

• 1:19:09David Goggins?

  In the race of life, life's not gonna give you a glass of water when you're thirsty.

• 1:19:16David Goggins?

  And I realized that. And once again, people have been like, God, your life is horrible. It's not.

• 1:19:22Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:23David Goggins?

  This is how I live. This is how I live. This is what I want. I don't judge anybody. This is how I live. And there, if there's not people like me in this world with this kind of mentality. It's not be like David Goggins, go run two hundred miles. Take something from this. Take something from this. Remember where I started from. You don't need to go where I went.

• 1:19:50Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:19:50David Goggins?

  I went this far because I started opening different doors to the cellar in my brain. My God, is this possible? Oh, my God, that's possible. This is possible. I started opening different compartments. You can leave them shut. I don't care. So what I do now in the morning times, I do this because why life's not going to give me to get out of jail free card.

• 1:20:11Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:11David Goggins?

  And if I come on here on this podcast and talk this stuff. I have to live what I say. So when you come from a world of used to lie a lot. And my big thing is facing all this crap. I cannot tell you something I have not done.

• 1:20:28Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:20:28David Goggins?

  Because why? When you start to formulate this character.

• 1:20:34David Goggins?

  This code of ethic. This ethos that you live, not anybody else, this is your own. I cannot tell you something that I haven't done. Why? Because it will haunt me. You are now drinking the Kool-Aid. A lot of people write books on self-help, mental toughness, all this crap. Half of them are living up to that standard.

• 1:20:55Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:57David Goggins?

  Half of them are living up to that standard. You have to be able to practice what you preach. It has to be what you are. That's why we feel like, my God, when you speak on stuff, it's so passionate. Because you're making me relive my life.

• 1:21:12David Goggins?

  It's not a comfortable life. This life was made. This life was earned.

• 1:21:16Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17David Goggins?

  And if people like it, great. If not, so be it. At nighttime, I think about nothing.

• 1:21:23Lewis Howes?

  When you're stretching or when you're?

• 1:21:24David Goggins?

  When I'm stretching.

• 1:21:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25David Goggins?

  That's my time. That's my time to sit back and recharge for tomorrow. Because why this is not, mental toughness is not a class. We have this class that they designed. Eat an elephant one by that time. Self-talk, visualization, arousal control. It's all great. It's all great. It has to be a lifestyle.

• 1:21:56Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58David Goggins?

  You work on mental calypso on a daily basis. Cause your, even though your brain, your mind, like, like your brain isn't a muscle so much. You will lose it. You will lose the ability to suffer in the worst of times if you come out of it for too long.

• 1:22:18David Goggins?

  If you can lift three hundred and fifteen pounds and you stop going to the gym for a month. I guarantee you won't be able to pick the same weight up again. All the stories I talked about today, all the things in that book. If I went and said, I'm good.

• 1:22:37David Goggins?

  I gained all this knowledge. If I stopped today, the knowledge is gone.

• 1:22:43Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:44David Goggins?

  I had to go back deep to retrieve it. I don't want to go back deep to retrieve it. I want to be able to call on it now. That's why I do these things. I know what not doing them will get me.

• 1:22:56Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. There's so much more I want to ask you, but I want to try to wrap it up here with, with three final questions. I didn't even get to any of the questions I had on here, because I'm just so inspired by everything. But if you guys haven't picked this up yet, you can preorder it right now. Again, Can't Hurt Me, Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds. Make sure you guys get this book, get a few copies for friends. Give them out as gifts. This will be one of the most powerful things you give to someone. This is called, actually, I'm curious about, I didn't, I asked you about the greatest lesson from your mom, but I'm, I'm curious. What's the greatest lesson your dad taught you, whether he actually said it or you observed it?

• 1:23:36David Goggins?

  Um, I observed it.

• 1:23:37Lewis Howes?

  Or what, or what not to do, or, yeah.

• 1:23:39David Goggins?

  So I observed it from my dad.

• 1:23:43David Goggins?

  When I left, I was young. I had a young man's, a, a young kid's point of view on my father. So when I was twenty-two at three hundred pounds, I went back to see my dad.

• 1:23:57David Goggins?

  Because I want to make sure that what I saw at eight is the same this because it's my father. I don't want to not talk to my father, no matter what he did, no matter what I saw, but was it through a young kid's eyes? So at twenty-two, I went back. And I was able to examine him at a, as a, as a man. As a fragile man that I was.

• 1:24:22Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 1:24:23David Goggins?

  But I was able to examine him. And through this process, by this, so by this point in my life, I was examining myself. And realized I have a whole mess of problems. Big time. Some were from him, some were for people that bullied me, a lot were from me. And in knowing how messed up I was, I was able to examine everybody around me. I examined him. And I examined him to know, my God, the insecurities that you must have, the problems that you must have inside of you. I don't want to have those.

• 1:25:02David Goggins?

  I come from my father.

• 1:25:05David Goggins?

  I have what he has.

• 1:25:08David Goggins?

  And I didn't want to be him.

• 1:25:11David Goggins?

  Why he made fun of me, my brother, why he beat the hell out of me, my brother, my mom. It comes from a dark place, an insecure, dark, dark place. Why he womenized, why he sold prostitutes, why he ran pro, all this stuff he did. A good human being doesn't need to do that. A fulfilled human being doesn't need to break anyone down. All they do is want to build you up. So anybody you meet that calls you out of your name, that bullies you, that messes you up, that, that makes you feel not lifted, they are dealing with something deep rooted. Yeah, you have to have a tough tone with some people to help them out. There's a difference.

• 1:25:57David Goggins?

  You have to be hard. I'm hard on people, but it comes from a good place.

• 1:26:00Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01David Goggins?

  The biggest lesson he taught me was how not to be. And that's why I had to fix what I was. Because insecurities make everybody around you feel like hell. And that's the one thing I did not want anyone to feel like. That's why I judge no one. Tons of whites have called me. I've been, tons of people have hurt me. I judge no one, cuz I know where it comes from.

• 1:26:30David Goggins?

  I know you. I was once you. That's why now the place I'm at, you get a get out of jail free card. You need to help yourself. You ain't bullying me, man.

• 1:26:41Lewis Howes?

  Right, you're fine.

• 1:26:42David Goggins?

  You're, I'm good.

• 1:26:43Lewis Howes?

  Whatever you throw at you.

• 1:26:44David Goggins?

  I'm good. I know what's wrong with you, cuz I was once you. So, I started to examine people, examine myself, examine my darkness. Realizing how I cannot be, but I got it from examining him. Saying I cannot be that.

• 1:27:02Lewis Howes?

  That's a powerful lesson. So it's a good lesson that he taught you. Through that observance. How do you react or respond when someone says something to you negative or cuts you off in a car or something happens in life every day? That could potentially upset you. Do you react? Do you respond? Do you do nothing? Do you give them a hug? I mean, what is the process for you now?

• 1:27:24David Goggins?

  The process used to be angry David Goggins.

• 1:27:27Lewis Howes?

  Scream at them, swear at them, yeah. Pick a fight.

• 1:27:29David Goggins?

  That was the old me. The old me was pick a fight, go, go do whatever. Through this process of my life, when you get to this point I'm at, yeah, and I still be in a car and I'll talk to my fiance, this, this is jackass, whatever, whatever. I now know that I can escalate a problem that's not really a problem. I now, now, I have a, a throttle. And that's through self-examination. Is this a big, is this a big deal? Is this something I need to approach with a level three engagement of like, we're going at it? Or is this a level two engagement? So now you have to be mature enough, and I really big on maturity cuz I was never mature for so many years.

• 1:28:14David Goggins?

  With age and knowledge, you have to bring in maturity. Age doesn't mean you're mature. It's going back in and say, okay, man, look, I'm at a point in my life.

• 1:28:26David Goggins?

  What is smart? If I do this, I I can see the future. I can see that if I do this, this is going to happen. I'm going to escalate this problem. Is this warranted? There are some things that warrant me to escalate a problem.

• 1:28:41Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:42David Goggins?

  And that's what I do now. I take it through a process.

• 1:28:44Lewis Howes?

  You rate it, yeah.

• 1:28:45David Goggins?

  Yes. It it it goes on a rating program.

• 1:28:48Lewis Howes?

  Got it. Powerful. This is called the three truths. I ask this question to everyone at the end. It's called three truths.

• 1:28:57Lewis Howes?

  Imagine it is your last day. And you get to pick the day whenever you want. You get to live as long as you want. You pick the day. But it's time for your body to go, right? You've created everything you want to create. You've you've been at ninety nine percentile of potential for as long as you can live. You've done it all. You've checked off the list that everything that God says that you were supposed to do. It's happened.

• 1:29:20David Goggins?

  Right.

• 1:29:21Lewis Howes?

  Written the books, everything you want to do, done. But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your written word and videos and and and audio stuff that's out in the world. You've got to take it with you. But you get to write down on a piece of paper the three things you know to be true about all of your experiences. And this is what you leave behind. The three lessons, or what I like to call the three truths. What would you say are your three truths?

• 1:29:45David Goggins?

  The first one is you are your own hero. You are your own leader. You are your own master. And that is a big one because we idolize so many people. And we want to be them. We want to be someone else. And in doing that, you lose all the potential of who you are. You mimic. You be them. You are them. You become them. And you lose you. And we look up to so many people in this world who will let us down. We're humans. I'm gonna let you down, you're gonna let somebody down. If you put them on a pedestal, you then lose time when that person comes up and lets you down.

• 1:30:29David Goggins?

  You must hold yourself accountable and being your own hero, that's what that does. You make yourself so totally accountable for who you are, you focus on you and only on you. To become the best person you could be for others. Because we leave a lot on the table, not searching who we are. And then therefore, you die not knowing your greatest potential.

• 1:30:54Lewis Howes?

  That's one.

• 1:30:55David Goggins?

  That's one. The, the, the next one I would say is, um. The biggest one I would say is never pick the easy road. Never, never, and it always goes back to kind of that, 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, people want it so fast. You're, you may achieve what you wanted.

• 1:31:32David Goggins?

  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.

• 1:31:56Lewis Howes?

  You keep a six pack forever.

• 1:31:58David Goggins?

  You keep it. Because you know the work that goes into it.

• 1:32:03David Goggins?

  And the last one is, when you get to where you wanna go in life, you finally get there, you finally reached that point. And you're there, and you're happy as hell, realize this.

• 1:32:18David Goggins?

  You're not there yet.

• 1:32:19Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 1:32:21David Goggins?

  When you get that feeling that you arrived, be afraid.

• 1:32:27Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:32:27David Goggins?

  Be truly afraid. Because now you start to do this.

• 1:32:32Lewis Howes?

  Slowly die.

• 1:32:33David Goggins?

  Slowly die. Either you're getting better or you're getting worse. You're not staying the same.

• 1:32:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39David Goggins?

  So when you get to where you think the journey is ended, and you're sitting back and you're like, I arrived, I'm on Mount Everest. I climbed twenty-nine, zero, twenty-nine.

• 1:32:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:52David Goggins?

  The best thing to do is fall back down that damn mountain as fast as you can and start climbing.

• 1:32:57Lewis Howes?

  Find the next climb.

• 1:32:58David Goggins?

  Find the next climb.

• 1:32:59Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man, I'm gonna sign up for another event.

• 1:33:03David Goggins?

  That's it.

• 1:33:04Lewis Howes?

  Sign up for another endurance event now. Oh, just kidding. Um, where can we connect with you online? Where do you like to, when you spend five minutes a month? Where, where is that space?

• 1:33:16David Goggins?

  My social media, whether it be Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, it's all, this is David Goggins, at David Goggins.

• 1:33:23Lewis Howes?

  Cool, David Goggins. Your videos on Instagram are great. You should post more, have someone on your team post more, because they're awesome.

• 1:33:29David Goggins?

  Well, they're all me.

• 1:33:30Lewis Howes?

  They're all you.

• 1:33:31David Goggins?

  Yeah, so there, I have no team.

• 1:33:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:33David Goggins?

  It's me, my fiance, there is no team. She'll be in the car, she'll be on a mountaintop, she'll be somewhere. It's all my material, it's all who I am. That's why I post once a week.

• 1:33:43Lewis Howes?

  Once a week right now?

• 1:33:44David Goggins?

  Once a week, every Monday, you'll get a post.

• 1:33:46Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 1:33:47David Goggins?

  That's it.

• 1:33:47Lewis Howes?

  It's some video that's gonna inspire you to be like, okay, I need to do at least five more minutes of working out, something at least.

• 1:33:53David Goggins?

  That's it.

• 1:33:54Lewis Howes?

  Um, well, I want to acknowledge you, David, for, for your intensity, your, your work ethic, your passion, and also your, your pure, real heart. Because just meeting you for the first time, walking in together, just like I can tell how real you are, and you're just a no BS type of guy. The, the adversity that you've overcome is crazy. Obviously, people have overcome more than you, me, and lots of people in the world, but what you had to overcome physically and psychologically and emotionally is unbelievable. And to see that you weren't a statistic, and instead you chose every single day to make a decision to be more than that is really inspiring.

• 1:34:40Lewis Howes?

  And I, and I know this is gonna impact and inspire a lot of people, so I acknowledge you for your heart. And for inspiring me, you know, I thought I worked out hard, but this is like, I feel like I'm doing nothing with my life. So you're gonna inspire me to continue to make bigger commitments and longer commitments. Moving forward now, so I appreciate everything you do, man, and I'm excited about getting us out there.

• 1:35:01Lewis Howes?

  You're welcome. My final question is, what's your definition of greatness?

• 1:35:06David Goggins?

  Um, you know what? My definition of greatness is this. It's not a definition, it's an example. This is greatness, true greatness. Let's say that

• 1:35:21David Goggins?

  I'm the greatest tennis player of all time. Okay, let's say that. I hate tennis.

• 1:35:28David Goggins?

  Let's say I'm the greatest tennis player of all time. And I did 22 years, I ran all the Grand Slams, I have all the, I beat Roger Federer, I am the best ever.

• 1:35:39David Goggins?

  And we're having an interview, and you're talking about my greatness, what I achieved, and I'm retired. Don't play tennis anymore, haven't touched a racket in years. And you're making me go back through my life, you're kissing my butt about how great I am. And I'm answering your questions, every question I'm answering it, I'm with you. But in the back of my mind, all I'm thinking about is all the times I could have won those matches that I lost by not bringing my best mindset. You're haunted by all the opportunities that you missed by not bringing your best at that time. When you could have won, but you didn't win because you allowed life

• 1:36:21David Goggins?

  to interfere with that one shot, when you're sitting there getting ready to serve for the match. And your mind is not thinking about where that ball placement needs to be, but thinking about your family, this, or this at work, or that at work. That's greatness. Greatness is your recall on every single shot that you missed throughout a 20 something year career. Every shot, you can go back and say, I was here. This person was in the red shirt there. Greatness is being so aware of the time.

• 1:36:56David Goggins?

  Of life in the second that went by and you can recall like it was yesterday. Greatness is being able to go back there, not making that same mistake again and being haunted by it. That is greatness.

• 1:37:10Lewis Howes?

  Hmm, David Goggins, thanks, man. Appreciate you, man.

• 1:37:13David Goggins?

  Thank you.

• 1:37:14Lewis Howes?

  Powerful. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

• 1:37:58Lewis Howes?

  And now it's time to go out there and do something great.