بخش 06

She’s a famous British hypnotherapist, and she works with Olympians, she works with celebrities, and she spoke about, in one of our previous episodes, she spoke about five things that make top performers top performers, and one of the things she observed is that all of these top performers, they willingly put themselves through suffering. She said, now, now this was a big lesson for me, because I was one of those people where I would get up, and I knew I had to go to the gym or exercise three times a week. And sometimes I’d get up and I’d make these excuses. Nah, you know, I’m too busy today. I don’t feel like it. I have a bit of the sniffles. Maybe I shouldn’t exacerbate that. And Marissa changed me in one fricking interview. She said the greatest people in the world know that you don’t do things always because they are fun. Sometimes you will do things because they are painful, because you know that that is what is going to make you who you are. So great performers, they willingly, openly, consciously do things which are painful because they know that that pain is going to get them to the next level. That flipped my mind. I never skipped a gym day again. [David] You know what’s funny about that, though, about the second thing you said about the badge. It’s a true statement. But it’s also, there’s a caveat to that. There’s a big caveat to that. That badge is earned. We earn the badge, we go through the typhoon, we go through the Spartan Race, we do whatever we do in life. We earn the badge, but a lot of us never want to go back again. The badge can be earned and also forgotten. That’s why you have to go back every single day, because the mind is a very powerful thing. It doesn’t want to go there. It doesn’t want to suffer. It doesn’t want to suffer. So once you suffer once, or twice, or three times, you’re good. Do you think that sticks with you forever? It doesn’t. If you stop reading right now. You stop running. You stop going to the gym. You stop mathematics, stop anything. You forgot the equation. You forget the equation. You could be the best person in your damn math class, but you go back four or five years later, God I got an A in this. What, I don’t remember this. It goes for everything you do in life, especially suffering. If you do not suffer on a constant basis. And I’m not saying go out there and run on broken legs. Suffering’s different for everybody. And suffering’s just being very uncomfortable a lot. People want to know how did you get so mentally tough, David Goggins? How’d you get there? How’d you get there? By exactly what that hypnotherapist said. There were no mental toughness tricks back then. There was no training back when I grew up. This whole mental toughness craves, this came around years after I became who I was. It was just doing. Whatever my mind said I don’t want to do, I realized I must do that, because what got me where I was at, 300 pounds, spraying for cockroaches, a loser, not going to school, I was doing exactly what made me feel good. And it got me exactly where I was at. Nowhere. When I started takin’ this other path over here, the path I didn’t want to go on, the path of most resistance, I started realizing, my God, this sucks like hell over here. It’s so painful and it’s scary. It’s dark. It’s lonely. There’s very few people over here. That’s when I started realizing, my God, but look at the growth I have. Look what’s happening to me. I’m losing weight. I’m smarter. I have

confidence. I have courage, the self-discipline I have, the ability to face myself in the morning, the ability to win the war in the morning. I’m winning the war every morning. Every morning I get up, people think I have some special ability to get up and just workout every day. No. I now realize what my mind’s going to do. I now control my mind, versus the inner dialogue you had about, I work out three days a week, I’m not going to go today. I have the same dialogue. But now I know it’s like breathing air. I must do this, because I know on the other side of this, I know there’s greatness over there. [Vishen] Wow, so take us through that dialogue. When you’re running these intense, crazy ultra marathons, right, like Badwater, or any other example, what’s going through your head when you, when you’re about to hit that wall. [David] So I hit a lot of walls in a 135-mile race through Death Valley in the summertime, a whole bunch of them. What we just talked about, it all comes back to mindset. And a lot of us talk about self-talk. Self-talk is big nowadays. It’s big.