بخش 03

She was constantly getting beat. And so, when you’re a young kid and you see this, you want to protect your mom. So my instinct wasn’t like to get help, tell your mom this is how your life is. She never saw one report card of mine. She didn’t know that I was going to flunk out of school. She didn’t know how bad things were. I never told my mom that I’m getting called nigger all the time. First of all, it’s not cool to be bullied, you know, so I had two different David Goggins’. I had the David Goggins that was afraid, that was very timid and afraid, and I had the David Goggins that walked around like he was cool, that nothing hurt him. That was the fake guy. [Vishen] So even as a young man, you had to create this fake identity to protect you from the brutality of the world you were living in. Because you had a father who was abusive. [David] Right. [Vishen] Your mom’s fiancé was murdered. [David] Right.

[Vishen] You were beaten up in school. You were in a racist school, like, one of only five black kids in a school with 2,000 white kids, in KKK territory. And you were called a nigger all your life. [David] Right, well, I have to be real clear on this. What’s funny about that is that I was a pretty popular kid in that school. That’s the thing. When you look back on it, all you see is the racism. You don’t see the popularity and all the kids that liked you. The power in being able to calm your mind down and think, that’s one thing I learned in my life, is that when I was in hell I wasn’t able, I wasn’t able to be in hell and be calm. Hell makes you anxious. Hell makes you want to get out of it. It’s that person who has the ability to be in hell and think very calmly, very rationally about what the hell is going on. What’s the truth? What’s the reality? Why’s my dad this way? Why are these kids calling me nigger? Why? Why? Why? You have to be able to piece people apart. Take it down, dissect it and see what’s going on. So back then I didn’t have those skills. I had no skills. All I saw was a whole bunch of kids liked me, but I no longer saw that. All I saw was the spray-painting on my car. Me being called nigger. That’s all I saw. My lens was this big. It was very small, very small fucking lens, where now my lens is very, it’s huge. I see everybody for who they are and what they are. So that’s the one thing that changed in me was my reality. We always paint a fucked-up reality that’s not even true. It’s the reality of what we think is true because our lives aren’t what we want it to be. [Vishen] Now you took suffering, and you made that a superpower. [David] Yes. [Vishen] And one of the things that make you David Goggins, right, is your belief in suffering in order to grow. [David] Yes. [Vishen] Tell us about that. [David] Well, I realized that God wasn’t going to give me a get out of jail free card. And from the time I was born until the time I was 19 years old, my life had these hurdles. I constantly hit obstacles. Obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And I had to figure out how to manage suffering, how to deal with it, because it’d be part of my life forever. At least that’s what I thought. So in order to deal with it, I had to be able to conquer it, and overcome it, and deal with it, and know that in this suffering there has to be some kind of growth. With every obstacle, I look at it as friction now. Without friction, there is no growth. You have to have friction in your life to grow. So I started looking at all these different things versus the woe is me mentality, like, oh my God, look at my life. My life’s so fucked up. I come from this fucked-up family. I’m being

beaten. I’m being abused mentally, physically. I started looking at it as the perfect trial ground. So I had to flip it upside down and say, okay, I’m suffering tremendously, mentally. Use this to your advantage versus your disadvantage. So that’s what I did. Versus looking at it as, like, oh my God, woe is me, I’m never going to get out of here. I looked at it as, okay, hang on a second. Hang on a second. If I can overcome this. If I can find some power in this, some way to get through this, that right there would be the fuel for rest of my life. And so I found great strength in suffering. Great strength in it because why? Through all of that it started to callus my mind over the victim’s mentality. [Vishen] You know, and there’s interesting data on that, which is why I find what you’re saying so interesting. So in Salim Ismail’s book Exponential Organizations, there’s this quote that blew me away. So he was studying all of these companies and he shares this study of Google, and Google wanted to figure out what makes their best people. And at first they thought it was STEM education, science, technology, engineering, math, but then what they found, it was their best people were people who had gone through suffering. [David] Yes. [Vishen] Suffering made people more humble. It made people more kind.