بخش 08

multitasker. Sometimes in life you have to learn to focus on the single point, and that’s what happens here. So now my aggression’s going higher. My focus is getting better. I’m reading the door. My mind is where it needs to be. It’s not back at home. I’m in Iraq right now. Or I’m, you know, wherever I’m at. This is where I’m at now. Whatever’s happening at home is happening at home. It’s all about locking in to that moment, and that’s where you start to harness this strength, slowly getting closer, and closer, and closer to the object in front of you. Once you’ve read that door, now you’re thinking, okay, I read the door right. Now I can’t think about what’s behind the door, still now, once you open the door, now it’s about doing your job. My job, isn’t, let’s say there’s a bunch of people with, like, AK-47s in front of me. I can’t attack them. My job is to clear this left corner. If a guy has a AK-47 in front of me, my job is to clear my fucking corner. So you have to once again retrain your brain to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of, and everything you cannot control, fuck it. Fuck it. I can’t control my wife at home right now, my kids at home right now. I can’t control that. All I can control is the 20 feet between me and this door. Now the 20 feet’s collapsed. Now I can control the door. Now I can control my corner. There’s a lot of things in life we try to control that we can’t control, and it takes us away from our fucking focus.

[Vishen] Man, you’re right. [David] And that’s the whole thing about this imagery here. In Iraq I cannot control what’s happening back in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s out of my control. So why is your fucking mind there? Why is your mind there? That’s what gets people in that situation killed, but in life itself it pulls us away from the task at fucking hand. We worry about all this meaningless bullshit. Like when I was in Brazil. In those few kids, at that time was everybody, all 10,000 people in fucking Brazil called me a nigger. It wasn’t. It was a handful of racist kids. But my reality wasn’t there. I didn’t see the picture I see now, and that’s what all this is about is seeing the real picture in front of you. What can you truly control? Control that and move forward. [Vishen] And you can control living life with a sense of discipline. [David] Period. [Vishen] And focus, and let’s go back to this other key idea that you brought up, which is powerful message, guys. I want you to write this down. If you can do things you hate to do, on the other side is greatness. Right, you quoted that in one of your interviews. [David] 100%. [Vishen] Let’s talk about that for a moment. I think you referred to it as the warrior mindset. [David] So, a lot of us are familiar with Navy SEALs. I was a Navy SEAL for 15 years. I was a polarizing person in the SEAL teams, either you really liked me, or you fucking hated me. I started realizing why that is, and that goes for, I’m that way with everybody. And this is why I believe in the warrior mindset. Is that person, so for instance, guys go through Navy SEAL training, arguably some of the hardest training in the world. They get that trident. They kick the shit out of you during training. They make you not even want to go back to the water. They make you semi, like not so much afraid, they make you really respect the cold, to the point where you only do it if you have to do it. That’s the kind of mindset right there that I don’t have. I do it because I have to do it every day, not because the job is making me do it. That’s the warrior mindset. The warrior mindset is that person that is doing things that they don’t want to do every single day. And it always goes back to that. A lot of people earn, like for instance, the Spartan Race. Good for you, man. What are you doing today? That’s the warrior mindset. A warrior crosses a finish line and continues to run, in his mind. There is no finish line. There is no finish line. There is no true accomplishment yet. A lot of times we live in this fucking accomplishment world. Like let’s say I did Badwater. I won the 135-mile race. I’m going to enjoy this for a while. No, no, I’m not saying don’t enjoy it. What

are you going to do fucking tomorrow? This day is over. A warrior realizes this accomplishment is over. It’s over.