In Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins describes his transformation from someone who let his circumstances control him to someone who proactively seeks greatness by tackling new challenges. He thinks everyone can work to cultivate a drive for self-improvement in order to overcome obstacles and reach their goals.
Goggins provides ten challenges to help people work efficiently toward their goals.
As you grow up, your life circumstances can affect your growth and development. Though it seems counterintuitive, acknowledging the difficult circumstances you’ve faced can be a good first step toward overcoming additional challenges—you can draw strength from your past successes.
For Goggins, acknowledging and overcoming his school struggles and his abusive father opened new doors. Before age 8, Goggins lived with his mother, father, and brother in Buffalo, New York. His father frequently beat all of the family members. Due to working nights at his father’s roller skating rink, 8-year-old Goggins fell behind in school.
Eventually, his mother sought help from a friend to get herself and her children to safety, escaping to live in her hometown of Brazil, Indiana. In Brazil, Goggins faced an unsupportive 3rd-grade teacher. He developed a stutter and began cheating to pass.
To begin confronting the obstacles you currently face, take stock of the circumstances that have shaped your life, past and present:
You may struggle to take actionable steps to reach your goals. In this challenge, break your goals into smaller steps, regularly work toward them, and keep yourself accountable to achieve success.
As a teen, Goggins continued to struggle with racism, school, and a longing to join the Air Force, but he didn’t want to use his struggles as excuses. So he devised a way to make his goals more manageable: writing Post-it notes of goals on his mirror to hold himself accountable for reaching them.
When Goggins lived in Brazil as a young kid, he’d been unaware of racism. This started to change when he and his mother later moved back to Brazil from Indianapolis and he faced a slew of harassment, including being threatened at gunpoint on a rural road. He struggled to understand how people could be so hateful. He also felt the loneliness of being one of the only black people in town.
Goggins didn’t know how to channel these emotions. He started trying to come up with ways to get a rise out of the racists around him, wearing unusual clothing, trimming his hair in odd ways, and blaring music from his car.
Though Goggins was now in high school, he still relied on cheating to pass school and was reading at the 4th-grade level. He wanted to join the Air Force but didn’t realize he’d need to pass an aptitude test. He was unable to cheat, and he didn’t pass on his first attempt.
Then, at the end of his junior year, Goggins received a letter that he wouldn’t graduate unless his attendance record and grades improved during his final year. This moment led him to a self-reckoning in his bathroom mirror. He felt frustrated with who he saw that day—a kid with few prospects who wouldn’t be able to make it into the Air Force without getting tough with himself and changing his behavior. He resolved to reach his goal of getting into the Air Force by improving his reading skills and studying for the test.
Each night, he wrote his goals for the next day down on Post-it notes and placed them on the mirror, his “accountability mirror.” Then, he’d make sure he worked toward his goals each day. He’d give himself a tough talk about the steps he needed to take and why. For example, he’d call himself out for being stupid and tell himself he needed to study to fix that. He found this method more motivating than being gentle with himself.
Using his accountability mirror to work toward his goals allowed Goggins to pass the Air Force qualifying exam and graduate from high school.
An “accountability mirror” helps you break your goals and dreams into manageable steps and offers a visible reminder of what you’re working toward. It’s called an accountability mirror because it helps you hold yourself accountable for taking the steps necessary to achieve your goals.
Using Post-it notes or paper (rather than digital means), follow these steps:
Developing the mental willpower to do things that you dislike or that make you uncomfortable is another powerful tool to achieve your goals.
Goggins entered the Air Force because he wanted to become a pararescueman: a member of the Air Force troops that rescue downed pilots. But he faced a large obstacle: training to swim and rescue people in the water. Goggins had never taken swimming lessons and could only do the most basic of strokes. He worried so much about failing that it nearly became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Part-way through his swimming training, the Army doctors made Goggins pause his training after discovering that he had the sickle cell gene. At the time, they thought it could be life-threatening. Then, they reversed the decision: He could complete his training, but because he had missed some, he’d have to restart the training or transfer to another team.
The choice provided Goggins the reason to quit that he wanted after weeks of feeling like he wasn’t good enough to be a pararescueman. He was physically strong but didn’t have the mental willpower to start over and overcome this obstacle.
After his service, he continued to put on muscle but also fat, reaching 300 pounds. He worked a job in pest control and felt like he had no prospects.
One day, Goggins watched a TV program about the Navy SEALs and decided to apply, but he was told to get his weight down to below 191 pounds. He also needed to pass the same qualifying test he’d taken to get into the Air Force, but with a better score.
Goggins had 3 months to study and lose 106 pounds. He started exercising heavily, and if he skimped on any training, he made himself do the complete workout over again. He forced himself to do the work even when he didn’t want to. When he started doubting himself or feeling depressed, he realized he needed to redirect that energy into the exercise. He succeeded in losing the weight and passing the qualifying test.
To push yourself toward your goals, learn to do things that make you uncomfortable. They can be related to your goals, but don't have to be—building your tolerance for discomfort will prevent it from holding you back.
Here’s how to practice:
When working toward your goals, it’s easy to sabotage your success by doubting yourself. For example, you might feel intimidated by your opponents—anyone who you think doubts your ability to succeed, and who makes you doubt yourself. This could be a boss, teacher, or coworker.
Instead, work to harness your feelings around that perceived doubt and use them to apply yourself and prove your opponent wrong.
Goggins needed to survive grueling training to become a SEAL. During Hell Week, the recruits are broken into teams and subjected to hours of physically demanding tasks.
Goggins realized that he wanted some tools to help him best his opponents—the officers leading them in the exercises who wanted them to fail. Toward the end of Hell Week, Goggins’s team was exhausted. Goggins knew that the men on his team needed to harness their remaining energy to keep going and exceed their superiors’ expectations, earning their respect. He reminded his team about how the officers wanted to break them down and encouraged them to find the energy to succeed and not give them the satisfaction. Goggins calls this “taking souls”—acknowledging your opponents and using your feelings toward them to fuel your best work, take them by surprise, and earn their respect.
Using these strategies, Goggins and his entire team survived Hell Week, with no one going home.
Here’s how to use your feelings about your opponent to your advantage:
Learning to visualize the obstacles in your way and how achieving your goal will feel helps you keep going and address obstacles as they arise.
After spending some time at home to recover from a knee injury, Goggins developed stress fractures in his shins and had 6 months to go before completing SEAL training. When he’d start to doubt himself, he’d give himself talks of encouragement—saying that the only guaranteed way to fail is to quit, and championing his personal strength for pushing through on broken shins. He also visualized how accomplished he’d feel when he completed training.
After he graduated training, he felt motivated to continue defying the odds completing the world’s toughest challenges.
Practice visualizing your obstacles and successes with these two steps:
Another strategy to keep yourself working toward your goals even when you face obstacles is reminding yourself of your previous accomplishments. Goggins calls this collection of accomplishments your Cookie Jar.
While Goggins worked for the navy, he decided to raise money for the families of fallen soldiers by participating in ultra racing—running races longer than a marathon. He wanted to compete in the Badwater 135, a 135-mile race in California from the floor of Death Valley to the pinnacle of Mount Whitney.
To do so, he needed to compete in other ultramarathons first. He decided to compete in the San Diego One Day, but he was ill-prepared—in the previous 6 months, he had focused primarily on strength training and hadn’t run more than a mile at a time. By mile 70, he couldn’t go further.
After getting some assistance from his support team, he realized he could draw on another strategy to prevent him from quitting—his mental cache of past victories, or Cookie Jar. Thinking about his past victories and recognizing his toughness gave Goggins strength to finish the race.
Here’s how to build your own cookie jar:
Cars have an internal regulator, or governor, that limits how fast they can go. Humans are the same way—our mental governor gives us feedback, telling us if we’re in pain or feeling insecure. Many people listen too readily and stop doing a task when they’ve applied only 40 percent of their effort, leaving 60 percent on the table. Pushing past the governor means pushing through pain, insecurities, and other things that make us want to quit before we’ve given our full effort.
Goggins learned how to manage his Governor as he competed in additional ultra races to qualify for the Badwater 135.
Despite Goggins’s physical preparation for a race called the Hurt 100, the course was still extremely demanding. He encountered three main challenges:
Goggins realized that he could convince himself to keep going by dividing the remainder of the race into chunks. He’d say things like, “I just want to get to the top of that hill, then I can quit.” But instead of wanting to quit, doing that inspired him to keep going.
Finding motivation to persist helped him dismantle his governor. By showing himself that he could keep going even when he didn’t want to, he adjusted his expectations of how far he could push himself.
He was able to finish the race, and later that same day, submitted his application for Badwater 135. The director told him he was accepted a few days later.
Though he was arguably more prepared for this race than any he’d done before, Goggins still faced difficulty and wanted to quit. He became severely dehydrated about 7.5 hours in. To get through this, he worked to drink more water than he wanted, getting around his governor. (Shortform note: Sometimes, the thought of drinking a lot of water can be nauseating to a severely dehydrated person.) Ultimately, he came in fifth place.
To learn to push past your natural stopping point, try these steps:
People often think they need to have special talents to succeed in life. However, you often won’t be naturally talented at something. Instead, you need to schedule time every day to practice and hone your skills.
For example, the number one excuse people have for not exercising is that they don’t have enough time. But most people waste 4-5 hours a day doing things like watching shows or looking at social media. Compartmentalizing your time helps you make time for the activities that matter to you.
Shortly after completing a long-distance triathlon, a Navy admiral reached out to Goggins. He wanted Goggins to recruit people of color for operations against the Taliban in northern Africa.
To recruit more people of color, Goggins traveled to colleges and high schools across the country to speak. He learned to use himself as a prop to get students interested in his message. He’d run 50 miles to his speaking engagement and show up sweaty, or spend the first five minutes of his speech doing push-ups. He recognized that most people wouldn’t be interested in becoming a SEAL, so he worked to appeal to a broader swath of people, encouraging them to live to their fullest potential.
Goggins learned to compartmentalize his time to have time for work and athletics. For example, when he wasn’t traveling, he’d fit physical training into his daily schedule by running or biking to work. This allowed him to exercise and work 50 hours per week.
Do this challenge over 3 weeks:
Sometimes, we’re so scared of failing that we stop ourselves from even trying something. To avoid this, frame your failure as an opportunity to learn something so it feels less risky. Then, if you fail, you can evaluate the failure and refine your approach to reach your goal.
Once you’ve met your goal, push yourself to go above and beyond rather than settling to continuously improve yourself and achieve greatness that distinguishes you from others.
Goggins wasn’t content to be known just for his Navy career and ultra races. He realized that he did a lot of pull-ups as part of his regular training and wondered if he could break the world record for pull-ups in 24 hours.
It took him three tries to break the record. After each attempt, he evaluated what worked well and what needed improvement. He opted for a more private venue, a sturdier pull-up bar, and other fixes to diet and equipment to help him reach his goal.
Learn to reflect on your failure with these steps:
When you eventually reach your goal, it may be tempting to stop there. But many people operate this way. Instead, to set yourself apart from others, keep seeking new challenges rather than settling.
In Can’t Hurt Me, author David Goggins describes his transformation from someone who let his circumstances control him to someone who proactively works toward his goals and seeks greatness. He thinks everyone can work to cultivate a drive for self-improvement in order to overcome obstacles and reach their goals.
As a young man, Goggins developed strategies to push himself to achieve more. He especially enjoyed physical challenges, serving in the Army and as a Navy SEAL and competing in ultramarathons and other athletic events. He always looked for ways to push himself to new heights.
Goggins’s experience has taught him that most people don’t recognize or work toward their true potential. Working toward new goals can be uncomfortable because we’re trying new things that don’t come easy at first, like learning a new language or training for a half marathon. Because of this, it’s easy to make choices that keep you in your comfort zone and on the same mediocre path. He estimates that most people only achieve 40 percent of their potential.
Instead, you need to actively work toward mastering your mind and cultivating a relentless drive for self-improvement to achieve your dreams and overcome obstacles, from racism to tragedy. This requires learning how to move through doubts, pain, and fear that keep you in your comfort zone.
Goggins provides challenges to start working efficiently toward your goals. Here are the challenges, in brief:
As you grow up, your life circumstances can affect your growth and development. Though it seems counterintuitive, acknowledging the difficult circumstances you’ve faced can be a good first step toward overcoming additional challenges—you can draw strength from your past successes.
For Goggins, acknowledging and overcoming his school struggles and his abusive father opened new doors. Before age 8, Goggins lived with his mother, father, and brother in Buffalo, New York. His father forced the family members to work nights at his lucrative roller skating rink, called Skateland. If anything was out of place, like a missing pair of skates, Goggins’s father beat his son at home with a belt. His mother and brother faced regular abuse as well.
Eventually, his mother sought help from a friend to get herself and her children to safety. They escaped to her hometown of Brazil, Indiana, though his brother returned shortly thereafter to live with their father back in Buffalo. Goggins was 8 years old.
Due to his work at Skateland, Goggins had fallen behind in school. He, his brother, and mother worked at night, often sleeping on a couch in an office onsite. He was often sleep-deprived during the day.
When they arrived in Brazil, Goggins’s mother enrolled him in the second grade for a second time because he couldn’t yet read at a second-grade level. He had a wonderful teacher who dedicated extra time to helping him learn.
But during the third grade, Goggins’s teacher, Ms. D, wasn’t willing to give him the extra instruction and care he needed to succeed in class. She thought Goggins needed to be placed in a separate school for special needs students, and the school administration supported her.
It was stressful for Goggins to be thought of as lesser, especially because he was the only black child at the school. He scaled back his participation in class and developed a stutter. Goggins’s mother fought the decision to send Goggins to another school, and the school agreed to let him stay if he was enrolled in group therapy.
But group therapy included children with true illnesses, unlike Goggins, who needed assistance catching up academically. This further augmented his stress—his stutter worsened, and he started losing patches of hair and developing white splotches on his skin.
Refusing to continue with group therapy, and facing pressure from his teacher to do better, Goggins started cheating. It improved his grades and test scores, reassuring Ms. D but stunting his learning.
Goggins’s mother took a job at a local department store to support her son. They lived in subsidized housing, but still struggled to make ends meet.
When Goggins’s mother attempted to get on welfare, she learned she was considered ineligible because she had a car. She devised a workaround, routing the check through her mother, who lived in town. But the check was for only $123 each month. Between her job, welfare, and stores of coins she had saved over the years, they scraped by, but barely, augmenting Goggins’s stress.
Goggins learned later in life that toxic stress—the term for prolonged stress faced in childhood—likely altered his development.
Stress is helpful for survival in the short term, but in the long-term, it can have severe consequences. High stress levels limit children’s ability to retain information and build language skills, which limits their learning. When kids are exposed to toxic stress, they can develop health problems later in life, such as depression, obesity, and heart disease. They’re also more likely to engage in risky behavior, like smoking. A child raised in an abusive household has a 53 percent likelihood of being arrested before the age of 18, and is 38 percent more likely to commit a crime as an adult.
In his adult life, Goggins grappled with the effects of toxic stress from his childhood.
To begin confronting the obstacles you currently face, take stock of the circumstances that have shaped your life, past and present. In the upcoming chapters, you’ll learn how to use these circumstances as motivation.
Here are the steps:
Reflect on the negative circumstances you’ve faced and are facing.
List out the difficult circumstances you faced growing up.
List out the difficult circumstances you face now.
Pick one of your items from either list. Describe in detail how it affects you today.
You may struggle to take actionable steps to reach our goals. In this challenge, you’ll learn to break your goals into smaller steps and regularly work toward them to achieve success.
As a teen, Goggins continued to struggle with trauma, racism, school, and longing to join the Air Force. After receiving a particularly bad report card, he devised a way to make his goals more manageable: writing Post-it notes of goals on his mirror to hold himself accountable for reaching them. Goggins called this his “accountability mirror.”
In addition to the trauma Goggins faced at the hands of his father, another tragedy affected him and his mother in Indiana. His mother was engaged to be married to a man who was a good influence and provided some stability in their lives. They were scheduled to move into his Indianapolis home, but he was murdered days before the move.
Goggins and his mother moved to Indianapolis anyway, but his mother coped with her fiance’s death by busying herself with work. Goggins often skipped school and spent time with other kids, who negatively influenced his behavior. After his mom caught him skipping school with those students, she decided to move herself and Goggins back to Brazil.
When Goggins lived in Brazil as a young kid, he’d been unaware of racism. This started to change when he and his mother moved back from Indianapolis. Goggins faced a slew of direct and indirect harassment, from having his life threatened at gunpoint on a rural road to having a noose drawn in his Spanish workbook. He struggled to understand how people could be so hateful.
Despite having many good friends, most of whom were white, he still felt the loneliness of being one of the only black people in town. He thinks it’s hard for people to understand the struggle of being the only person like yourself around, yet many minorities, women, and gay people face this daily.
Goggins felt a lot of strong emotions from facing racism, but he didn’t know how to channel them. Seeking comfort, he watched the speeches of Malcolm X, the leader of the Nation of Islam whose movement called for racial justice for black people in the 1960s. He identified with X’s anger at a society that elevates white people, but he still couldn’t channel his frustration into anything beyond hate.
He started trying to come up with ways to get a rise out of the racists around him. He wore unusual clothing, trimmed his hair in odd ways, and blared music from his car.
Though Goggins was now in high school, he still relied on cheating to pass school and was reading at a 4th-grade level.
One of his only motivations to stay in school was to play on the basketball team, but because he didn’t attend summer workouts, the coaches didn’t think he was committed to the team. They let him go from the junior varsity team, even though he was one of the more talented players at the school. With this loss, Goggins lost any remaining motivation he had to succeed in school.
But he wasn’t completely without purpose. He wanted to join the Air Force thanks to stories his grandpa shared with him of his time serving. However, he didn’t realize that he’d need to pass an aptitude test to join. When he found out, he assumed he’d be able to cheat on the test. On his first attempt, he was seated too far apart from other test-takers to cheat and couldn’t pass. This was the first wake-up call that he needed to change his behavior.
The second wake-up call came at the end of his junior year, when his mother received a letter informing her that her son wouldn’t graduate unless his attendance record and grades improved during his final year. This moment led him to a self-reckoning in his bathroom mirror.
When Goggins looked in the mirror, he felt frustrated with who he saw that day—a kid with few prospects who wouldn’t be able to make it into the Air Force without getting tough with himself and changing his behavior. He resolved to get into the Air Force by improving his reading skills and studying for the test.
To do this, he decided to use the mirror as a device to hold himself accountable and reach his goals. Each night, he wrote his goals for the next day down on Post-it notes and placed them on the mirror. Then, he’d make sure he worked toward his goals each day. Often, this involved giving himself a tough talk about what he needed to do and why. For example, he’d call himself out for being stupid and say he needed to study to fix that. He found this method more motivating than being gentle with himself.
During his senior year, he focused on studying and being in good physical shape. After he failed the Air Force entry test a second time, his mom connected him with a tutor. His tutor taught him to use memorization to learn, and he’d read textbooks and copy them, greatly improving his knowledge of reading and algebra.
As he grew his skills, Goggins gained confidence and spent less time upset with racists. He felt too focused and determined to reach his goals to let racists distract him. After 6 months of studying, he took the Air Force entry test again and passed.
Making your own accountability mirror will help you break your goals and dreams into more manageable steps and offer a visible reminder of what you’re working toward.
Using Post-it notes or paper (rather than digital means), follow these steps:
Learn to face yourself in the mirror.
What are 3-5 things you feel insecure about? For example, maybe you’re uncomfortable with your weight or wonder if people like you.
Pick one of those insecurities and describe how it developed. For example, maybe you can remember the first time someone commented on your weight in a negative way.
Now describe a goal that could help you diminish that insecurity.
List the first three steps you’d need to take to achieve your goal.
Sometimes reaching your goals requires facing uncomfortable or difficult tasks. Learning how to do things you dislike helps you take steps toward your goals instead of staying in your comfort zone.
Goggins learned to face what made him uncomfortable during his service in the Air Force and the struggles afterward that motivated him to become a Navy SEAL.
Goggins entered the Air Force because he wanted to become a pararescueman: a member of the Air Force troops that rescue downed pilots. But he faced a large obstacle: training to swim. Many of the rescue operations would be over water, so he needed to pass a series of water competency tests.
Growing up, Goggins didn’t have swimming lessons, and he could only do the most basic of strokes. He also had difficulty floating, which made many of the tests, like being able to tread water without moving your arms, difficult. He spent nights full of fear about the next swimming test he’d have to pass. He doubted that he deserved to be there, felt rage toward the people in his cohort for having come from easier circumstances, and worried constantly about failing.
Part-way through his swimming training, the Army doctors discovered that he had the sickle cell gene. Though he didn’t have sickle cell anemia, doctors at the time thought that having the gene placed him at risk for sudden heart attacks. They made him pause his training, then reversed the decision. He could complete his training, but because he had missed some, he’d have to start from the beginning or transfer to another team.
The choice provided him the reason to quit that he wanted after weeks of feeling he wasn’t good enough to be a pararescueman. He was physically strong, but he didn’t have the mental willpower to start over and overcome this obstacle.
Goggins served out the remainder of his term working in the Tactical Air Control Party, or TAC-P. He felt ashamed that he hadn’t continued with the pararescue, and he told his family he’d been forced to transfer because of the medical issue. To address his shame, he exercised and built muscle mass. He weighed 255 pounds when he left.
After Goggins’s service, he continued to put on muscle, but also fat, reaching 300 pounds. He liked being bulkier in order to look intimidating. It helped him hide the shame he felt for not completing his pararescue training. Still, he felt like he had no real prospects and worked a job in pest control.
One day, Goggins watched a TV program about joining the Navy SEALs, one of the most elite special forces teams in the US military. He became convinced that he could find purpose for his life by becoming a SEAL.
He attempted to contact various naval recruiters, but most weren’t interested in recruiting previously-enlisted people from other parts of the military. One recruiter agreed to meet with him but was unwilling to enlist him because of his weight.
He found a recruiter willing to give him a chance, but to apply, he needed to get his weight down to below 191 pounds, the weight limit for a man of his height. He also needed to pass the same qualifying test he’d taken to get into the Air Force, but with a better score.
Goggins had 3 months to study for the test and lose 106 pounds. He started filling his days with running, swimming, biking, and weightlifting. At first, he could barely run 400 yards without needing a break.
If he skimped on any of his planned training, he made himself do the complete workout over again. For example, one day he decided not to do the last pull-up of his set, but he worried that cutting corners like that could cost him entry. So later that night, he returned to the gym and redid the entire set of 250 pull-ups. In addition to exercising, he adjusted his diet, eating small portions of healthy foods and ditching his go-to junk foods.
When he started doubting himself—feeling like he was crazy for attempting this—or feeling depressed, he refused to wallow and worked to redirect that energy into the tasks at hand, like exercising. He convinced himself that his struggles were evidence of having a new purpose in his life, which motivated him to stick with his training and studying. He was able to pass the exam and lose 106 pounds to qualify for entry.
To persevere and push yourself toward your goals, you have to learn to do things that make you uncomfortable. The uncomfortable task can be related to your goals, but it doesn’t have to be—building your tolerance for discomfort will prevent discomfort from holding you back from your goals.
As with the Accountability Mirror exercise, you’ll learn how to make incremental, achievable changes that last over time. Here’s how to practice:
Examine an activity you don’t like to do to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Describe an everyday activity that you avoid doing, like flossing or taking a walk.
What are some reasons you avoid that activity?
Imagine trying to make that activity a daily habit. What would some of your excuses be?
What could you say to yourself to get yourself to do the activity and undercut the excuses?
When working toward your goals, it’s easy to sabotage your success by doubting yourself. For example, you might feel intimidated by your opponents—anyone who you think doubts your ability to succeed and makes you doubt yourself. This could be a boss, teacher, or coworker.
Instead, work to harness your feelings around that perceived doubt and use them to apply yourself and prove your opponent wrong. Goggins discusses how he developed this technique to survive Hell Week of SEAL training.
Goggins needed to survive grueling training to become a SEAL. During one of the training periods, called Hell Week, the recruits are broken into teams and subjected to hours of physically demanding tasks, such as running miles in the sand, running holding logs or boats overhead, and standing in the cold ocean. Two-thirds of recruits drop out of the program during this week.
Goggins contracted pneumonia in both lungs and needed time to recuperate. By the time he’d recovered enough to resume training, he’d missed enough training that he’d need to start Hell Week from the beginning.
Before entering Hell Week a second time, Goggins realized that he wanted some tools to help him succeed. As with other military training, recruits are subjected not only to physically demanding activities, but also to intense verbal interactions from officers as they try to weed out the mentally strong from the weak. Goggins perceived these men as his opponents—they were actively trying to break him and the other men down and make them quit. He wanted to prove that he could survive Hell Week and impress them in the process.
To do this, he came up with two main strategies:
Using these strategies, Goggins and his entire team survived Hell Week, with no one going home. (Shortform note: To learn more about the strategies SEAL trainees use to survive Hell Week (and how to apply these lessons in your everyday life), read our summaries of Extreme Ownership and Make Your Bed.)
As Goggins’s story shows, surviving and thriving in a competitive situation is about using negative energy from an opponent to your advantage. Apply this idea to a situation in your life:
Take stock of an opponent you face and redirect your negative feelings.
Describe a challenge or competitive situation you face.
Who is your opponent in that situation? What do they think about you?
Describe a project you could do that would showcase your skills and impress your opponent.
Write the steps you could take to complete this project.
Visualizing the obstacles in your way and how achieving your goal will feel helps you keep going and address obstacles as they arise.
Goggins discusses taking a break from SEAL training to recover from an injury and how he used this visualization technique to push through intense physical pain once he returned.
In addition to the double pneumonia Goggins developed during his first round of Hell Week, he developed a severe knee injury. Though he wanted to continue training, the injury—a broken kneecap—wasn’t healing quickly enough, so he went home to Indianapolis to recover.
Because it was only an injury, he’d be allowed to return, but he’d be required to do Hell Week training for a third time. And if he survived, he’d need to train for another 6 months to become a SEAL.
While he spent time recovering, he learned that he would be becoming a father with his ex-wife, whom he had recently divorced. He felt unready and unsure of how to meld his life in Indiana with training to become a SEAL in California.
Though he considered quitting, he thought it would be a bigger failure to give up SEAL training than to try one more time and fail.
He decided to continue with training, remarry his wife, and move with her and his stepdaughter to California while he attempted to complete the training.
Goggins survived his third Hell Week, but he developed small fractures in both of his shins. SEAL training involved running up to 60 miles per week. He’d need a strategy to survive the remainder of the term. He started taping his shins to be able to do the run with less pain.
When he’d start to doubt himself, he’d give himself talks of encouragement—saying that the only guaranteed way to fail is to quit, and championing his personal strength for pushing through on broken legs. He also visualized how accomplished he’d feel when he completed training. He still felt pain periodically during the day, but speaking to himself like this mobilized the energy he needed to keep going. He graduated training and felt motivated to continue defying the odds completing the world’s toughest challenges.
Practice visualizing your obstacles and successes with these three steps:
1. Visualize a challenge or obstacle you need to overcome. Think about what it will look like and feel like when you do. For example, if you’re preparing to give a presentation and are nervous about answering questions at the end, visualize yourself answering with confidence.
2. Anticipate difficulty. There will be moments when working toward your goal feels impossible and you want to quit. You may doubt your abilities, struggle to make time to improve your skills, or question why you’re working toward this goal. Think about the obstacles you may face ahead of time and develop a plan to address them.
For example, if you’re struggling to train for a marathon and don’t have a clear answer for why you’re doing it, it’s too easy to say, “I don’t know” and give up. Instead, develop a clear answer as to why you’re working toward your goal to remind and motivate yourself to keep going.
3. (Optional) Share your story about how you’ve used this technique to overcome obstacles on social media with the hashtags #armoredmind and #canthurtme.
Picture overcoming a challenge to motivate and prepare yourself for achieving your goals.
Write a goal that you’d like to achieve.
Describe what it would look like and how it would feel to achieve it.
Describe 1-2 challenges you anticipate facing as you work on this goal.
Describe 1-2 things you could do to overcome these challenges.
We often decide to take on challenges while we’re in our comfort zone, but we’re so comfortable, we don’t anticipate obstacles that could arise. To deal with this, we need additional strategies to keep going, even when we face obstacles and want to quit.
Reminding yourself of your previous accomplishments is one way to overcome obstacles. Goggins calls this collection of accomplishments your Cookie Jar.
There’s science behind this strategy. If you get overwhelmed by obstacles, you may forget why you’re doing something and start talking to yourself in a negative way that robs you of energy to keep going. When you feel stressed, your body’s fight or flight system is at work. It’s trying to make a decision about whether to continue with what you’re doing (fight) or abandon it (flight). Focusing on your accomplishments instead of doubtful negative self-talk reminds you of what you’re capable of, giving you the energy to “fight” and keep going.
Goggins developed the cookie jar concept during his experience transitioning from Navy SEAL to ultramarathon runner.
In 2005, Goggins learned of the death of nearly an entire team of special operatives in Afghanistan. He wanted to raise college funds for the children of the deceased soldiers. As a fundraiser, he decided to try ultramarathons, running races that are longer than a marathon.
Goggins wanted to compete in the Badwater 135, a famous 135-mile ultramarathon in California from the floor of Death Valley to the pinnacle of Mount Whitney. But the event director required runners to have already competed in one 100-mile ultra race or more, and was unwilling to make an exception for Goggins. He suggested that Goggins compete in the San Diego One Day, a 24-hour, 100-mile race where each lap around the course is one mile. If he could do it, then he could run in the Badwater 135.
Goggins only had 3 days before the San Diego One Day, so there was little time to prepare. He hadn’t run more than one mile at a time in 6 months. Though he’d kept in good physical shape through strength training, his cardio fitness was nonexistent.
On the day of the race, Goggins started off at a fast pace, faster than he’d need to run to complete the race in 24 hours. But by mile 70, he couldn’t go any further.
Goggins’s wife, who was there supporting him, helped him into a lawn chair to rest. He was dealing with all kinds of bodily complications. Most of his toenails were falling off, and he’d learn later that he had stress fractures in his feet. He hid the bloody urine and diarrhea running down his legs from his wife so she wouldn’t pull him from the race.
Unable to see what terrible shape he was in, his wife believed he still had a chance to finish the race and encouraged him to keep going. But he was walking now, and she told him he needed to pick up the pace if he was going to make it 100 miles in 24 hours.
Despite desperately wanting to quit, Goggins drew upon yet another strategy to keep going—his Cookie Jar. Growing up, Goggins’s mother always made sure to stock their cookie jar with a variety of cookies. She’d let him have two at a time, and he learned to savor each cookie. It brought a little brightness to both of their lives.
He applied this as a metaphor to help himself get through tough times—he drew from a mental cookie jar of his accomplishments when times were tough. In this way, he used his past victories to motivate himself to keep going. Goggins’s cookies included studying to bring himself up to the appropriate reading level, passing the Air Force exam, and losing 106 pounds in three months to be eligible for SEAL training. This strategy is more than just thinking about the memory—it’s remembering how good it felt in the moment.
Thinking about his past victories and recognizing his toughness gave Goggins strength to start running again and finish the race. Though he suffered severe dehydration, he felt elated to be able to finish the hundred miles.
Just like Goggins, you can come up with your own set of victories to remind yourself of when facing difficulty. Here’s how:
Reflect on a past victory you can include in your cookie jar.
List your victories and hardships you’ve overcome.
Choose one victory or hardship from your list. How did you achieve or overcome it?
Think of a current goal you’re working to achieve. Write a 1-2 sentence statement that you can say to yourself about your past victory to remind yourself to continue toward this goal when you’re tempted to quit.
Cars have an internal regulator, or governor, that limits how fast they can go. Humans are the same way—our mental governor gives us feedback, telling us if we’re in pain or feeling insecure. Many people listen too readily and stop doing a task when they’ve applied only 40 percent of their effort, leaving 60 percent on the table. Pushing past the governor means pushing through pain, insecurities, and other obstacles that make us want to quit before we’ve given our full effort.
Learning to gently push yourself helps break down your governor while gradually increasing your activity, helping you avoid injury and/or allowing your mind to get accustomed to the new workload.
Goggins learned how to manage his governor as he competed in additional ultramarathons to qualify for the Badwater 135.
When Goggins finished the San Diego One Day, he called and emailed the director of the Badwater 135 to share his results from the race. He’d run 101 miles in 18 hours and 56 minutes and thought this was enough to qualify him for Badwater 135.
Instead, Goggins got an email back that the point of a 24-hour ultra race is to run the whole 24 hours, not just the miles stated. He learned shortly thereafter that to get accepted into the Badwater 135, runners were expected to submit an application showing their completion of other ultra races. So he decided to compete in an additional ultra race to be a more competitive applicant.
He selected a Hawaiian race called the Hurt 100. The race consists of five laps on a 20-mile circuit through the Hawaiian rainforest, including 24,500 feet of elevation change.
Goggins had about a month before the Hurt 100 to practice running and strength training. He’d heard that it’s important to run 100 miles in a week in preparation for 100-mile races.
But it was not going to be easy to fit in training time while still working for the Navy. He started running to—and occasionally, from—work, at least three times a week. The route measured 16 miles one way. He gradually built up the number of miles he ran each week. He also woke up early to train with weights.
Despite his physical preparation, the course was extremely demanding. Goggins encountered three main challenges:
Goggins realized that he could convince himself to keep going by dividing the remainder of the race into chunks. He’d say things like, “I just want to get to the top of that hill, then I can quit.” But instead of wanting to quit, hitting these mini-goals inspired him to keep going. Finding motivation to persist helped him dismantle his governor—by showing himself that he could keep going even when he didn’t want to, he adjusted his expectations of how far he could push himself.
He finished the race, and later that same day, he submitted his application for Badwater 135. The director told him he was accepted a few days later.
Goggins now had 6 months to prepare for the Badwater 135. In addition to physical training, he studied the race. He did things like researching the route, driving it, and watching race videos.
From this experience, he developed strategies for the big day, like having two help crews drive the route with him and set up a cool-down station for him every 1/3 of a mile. He also visualized how each leg of the race would feel and how he’d push through.
Though he was arguably more prepared for this race than any he’d done before, Goggins still faced difficulty and wanted to quit. He became severely dehydrated about 7.5 hours in. To get through this, he worked to drink more water than he wanted, getting around his governor. (Shortform note: Sometimes, the thought of drinking a lot of water can be nauseating to a severely dehydrated person.) Ultimately, he came in fifth place.
To learn to push past your natural stopping point, try these steps:
People often think they need to have special talents to succeed in life. However, you often won’t be naturally talented at something. Instead, you need to schedule time every day to practice and hone your skills.
For example, the number-one excuse people have for not exercising is that they don’t have enough time. But most people waste 4-5 hours a day doing things like watching shows or looking at social media. Doing this challenge will help you make time for working toward your goals.
Goggins’s life got extra busy once he started getting attention for his ultra racing. He learned to compartmentalize his time to work and train.
After his success in Badwater 135, Goggins got recruited into doing a race known as the Ultraman—a three-day event consisting of a 6.2-mile swim, 261-mile bike ride, and a double marathon. Despite some difficulties with his bike—he blew out a tire on a downhill—he managed to finish second in the race.
Shortly thereafter, a Navy admiral contacted him. It’s uncommon for the upper leadership in the military to talk with enlisted people, so Goggins worried he’d be reprimanded for drawing undesired attention to the Navy by participating in ultras. In fact, the admiral was impressed with Goggins’s achievements and wanted him to recruit more black people into the Navy SEALS to work on operations against Taliban forces in northern Africa—they needed SEALS that would blend into the local population.
Goggins was only the 36th black person to become a SEAL in the Navy’s history, and the Navy realized it needed to do more outreach in communities of color.
To recruit more people of color, Goggins traveled to colleges and high schools across the country to speak.
He learned that using himself as a prop was one of the most effective strategies to get students interested in his message. He’d run 50 miles to his speaking engagement and show up sweaty, or spend the first five minutes of his speech doing push-ups. He’d practice with the sports teams and invite students to work out with him before or after school and crew for him on weekends when he competed in local ultra races. He’d also run between cities he was visiting to garner local news coverage.
He recognized that most people wouldn’t be interested in becoming a SEAL, so he worked to appeal to a broader swath of people, encouraging them to live to their fullest potential.
During his busiest period as a recruiter, he was on the road for 250 days per year, but he still made time for physical training and competing in races on top of logging 50 hours at work each week. For part of 2007, he ran an ultra race nearly every weekend.
To achieve this, Goggins developed strategies to squeeze in exercise around his work schedule. For example, when he wasn’t traveling, he’d wake up early and run for 6-10 miles before work, then bike 25 miles to work, run or hit the gym during his lunch hour, and bike home.
On weekends he didn’t have an ultra event, he’d do a three-hour workout on Saturday, then spend the rest of the day with his wife. Sundays were his rest day—he did only very light exercise to promote good circulation.
Do this challenge over 3 weeks. Here are the steps:
Make time to do an activity that’s important to you.
What is an activity that you’d like to make time for in your day, and why?
What are 1-2 excuses for why you don’t have time for this activity?
Are these excuses valid? Why or why not?
List 1-2 activities that you waste your time on in a given day. Estimate how much time you spend on these activities.
If you cut down on the time-wasting activities, could you dedicate some of the time you’d save to the activity you’d rather be doing? Why or why not?
Sometimes, we’re so scared of failing that we stop ourselves from even trying something. To combat this, frame your failure as an opportunity to learn something so it feels less risky. Then, if you fail, you can evaluate the failure and refine your approach to reach your goal.
Once you’ve met your goal, pushing yourself to go above and beyond rather than settling can help you continuously improve yourself and achieve greatness that distinguishes you from others.
Goggins’s experience attempting to become an Army Ranger and breaking the Guinness World Record for pull-ups demonstrate these principles.
After Goggins’s SEAL training, he got deployed with a platoon to Malaysia where he realized that he held himself to a higher standard than other SEALS. SEALS are considered elite compared to the rest of the Navy and compared to society in general, but Goggins felt like he desired to push himself, train harder, and earn his keep more than even most SEALS wanted to.
In addition to physical training, Goggins spent his free time studying weaponry and war. In his first evaluation, he got feedback that he should spend some of that time socializing as a way to learn from the other guys informally and understand the job better. But he was introverted and didn’t want to spend time partying in off hours.
Most people take a break when they finish a deployment, but Goggins decided to look into training in the special forces units of other military branches between deployments. He requested to go through Army Ranger training—he felt he could better himself by gaining additional special operations skills.
Goggins traveled to Fort Benning, Georgia for Army ranger training. The training consisted of six different phases, including weapons knowledge, navigation, and reconnaissance. For example, one phase consisted of learning skills in the mountains like patrolling and rappelling.
To prove their skills, trainees had to complete four nighttime field training exercises. One night, a winter storm blew in, and all anyone had for warmth was a thin poncho and each other.
Goggins figured that the storm represented a perfect simulation of the conditions that would make soldiers vulnerable to an enemy attack. Instead of huddling with the group, he walked out to hold part of the perimeter, shouting into the night when he reached it. In doing so, Goggins demonstrated his interest in pursuing opportunities to lead and stand out from the rest. A few others were inspired and did the same.
Goggins wasn’t content to be known just for his Navy career and ultra races. Though he needed to take a break from ultra races due to dizzy spells, he realized that he did a lot of pull-ups as part of his regular training and wondered if he could break the world record for number of pull-ups in 24 hours. The record at the time was 4,020 pull-ups, which was held by Stephen Hyland. While doing pull-ups, he could take breaks and avoid the dizziness brought on by running.
Goggins reached out to the same organization he raised money for through his ultra running to ask if they’d accept fundraising from this event. Then, a friend of his booked him a spot to attempt to break the record on The Today Show.
To train for this appearance, he ramped up his pull-up regimen—400 pull-ups each weekday and 1,500 on weekend days.
When the big day came, Goggins immediately encountered several issues:
After doing 2,500 pull-ups, he decided to quit. Though he felt disappointed to have failed in front of a large audience, he realized he had a chance of succeeding if he tweaked his approach and tried again.
He evaluated what went well and what needed to be improved. For his second attempt, he decided to use a venue that was more private, eat better so his muscles didn’t get fatigued as readily, use gymnastic chalk and tape, and get a sturdier pull-up bar.
Goggins found a CrossFit gym near his mother’s home in Nashville that offered a sturdier bar and the more private environment he wanted. Gym members could help support him and cheer him on during the event, but it would be more private than the television studio.
During his second attempt, he encountered yet more difficulties.
After about 3,200 pull-ups, the pain was overwhelming and he wasn’t doing pull-ups fast enough to break the record. He decided to quit. However, he knew he wanted to attempt it again, so he took stock of what worked and what needed to change. For example:
During his third attempt, Goggins was still dealing with hand issues and rhabdomyolysis, as well as a new challenge: feeling like he was going to fail again.
Instead of turning his doubt inward on himself and hurting his performance further, he focused his energy toward the current record holder, Stephen Hyland. He pretended that Hyland was an evil genius that only he could defeat by taking his title, which gave him the energy to push on. He got past the record of 4,020 pull-ups, completing 4,030.
Learn to reflect on your failure with these steps:
1. Think of a recent failure.
2. Using a journal–on paper this time, if it isn’t already—use the following questions to help you evaluate the failure:
Even if you ultimately failed, it’s unlikely you did everything poorly in the lead-up. This is a chance to recognize the things you did right.
3. Make a list of things you could have done differently. Try to be as honest with yourself as possible.
4. (Optional) As soon as you can, schedule a time to make another attempt at the thing you failed at. If for some reason you can’t attempt the experience again, just do steps 1-3.
5. (Optional) Share your experience on social media with the hashtags #empowermentoffailure #canthurtme.
When you eventually reach your goal, it may be tempting to stop there. But many people operate this way. Instead, to set yourself apart from others, keep seeking new challenges rather than settling.
For example, if you reach your goal of running a half marathon, try another challenge. Maybe you try running longer distances or try trail running instead. Or, maybe you choose a different kind of physical challenge altogether, like swimming.
By age 38, Goggins had accomplished some impressive physical feats, but he started suffering health issues. He worked to find a solution, and later, retired from the Navy and pursued a new career.
Goggins faced many health issues in the pursuit of new challenges—running on broken legs, a knee injury—yet he always kept pushing himself. Eventually, he couldn’t keep pushing through his pain.
He felt fatigued all the time, no matter what exercise he tried. Doctors ran tests but discovered nothing except slightly suboptimal thyroid levels, which is common for elite athletes. They prescribed him medications that hardly improved his condition.
He wondered if he was close to death, having pushed himself past the point of no return. Yet he didn’t feel regretful; he felt content. All those years, he pushed himself to greatness so that he wouldn’t be defined by his negative past experiences. For the first time in recent memory, he recognized that his accomplishments took extreme hard work, which he was proud of, and he didn’t care if he ran again, lived, or died.
Goggins learned two things from reflecting on reaching his goals:
In addition to reflecting on his mental health, Goggins realized he’d been missing out on a crucial aspect of physical health: stretching. He’d heard a presentation about the importance of balancing strength training with flexibility, but he’d ignored the advice, thinking flexibility would somehow undermine his quest for strength. On his deathbed, with no other options, he decided to try it.
He learned that his muscles were so tight that it was limiting his blood flow and his body was shutting down. He started stretching hours every day, including during work, and his energy and health improved.
Goggins retired from the Navy in 2015 and started a new career as a wildlands firefighter. He enjoys the physical challenge and being part of a team that enjoys it, too. He’s also continuing distance running and pushing himself to new lengths, though the rage he used to channel for motivation is harder to locate these days.