You're going to lose sleep. You'll doubt whether it'll work. You'll stress to make ends meet.
You won't finish your to-do list. You'll wonder whether you made the right call and have no way to know, for years. This is what hard feels like, and that's okay. Everything worth doing is hard, and the more worth doing it is, the harder it is. The greater the payoff, the greater the hardship.
If it's hard, good. It means no one else will do it. More for you.
My biggest fear, honestly, was, let's say this, let's say, I don't care if you believe in God or not, I don't care. So let's just play a game with me. Let's say you're God. And we have a big, long line of people.
And I made it to heaven. I'm 75 years old. I'm 300 pounds. I made it to heaven.
I worked for Ecolab my entire life, praying for cockroaches. That's what I did. But I'm dead.
I'm in heaven now. And you are at, you're judging us all now. So we're in line. We're all sitting there in line.
And you have... Adam Brown, he has a big board up and you're talking to Adam Brown about his life and you rip it down and I'm next in line, David Goggins. I see my name and I see all this and God goes, hey, you say, read this man. Now I'm reading this list and I'm seeing 182 pounds, Navy SEAL, Ranger School, motivational speaker, changing lives. Okay, man, pull up record, all this sh...
And I'm like, that's not me, man. And God looks at me and says, that's who you were supposed to be. Hard work actually works. And with virtually everything.
It might not make you the best at whatever it is you're pursuing, but it will certainly make you better than you are. We're built to walk uphill. And when you reach the pinnacle of the hill, you want to stop and appreciate the vision, but... The next thing you want is a higher hill in the distance because it's the uphill climb that, it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value. And I mean this technically.
So almost all the positive emotion we feel, especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm, and that's to be filled with the spirit of God, by the way, because that's what enthusiasm means. That's experienced in relationship to a goal. You're lazy. You know exactly what to do, exactly what to do, because even me in my state of I can't read and write, I knew exactly what to do.
It just sucks doing it. It sucks to do it. I think a hopeful message that anyone can think about who's about who's in that hard period or in that start period is that it won't get harder.
Like this is the hardest part. And so if you can just make it through this, everything else is downhill. It's not that the things that you're, the dragons are going to slay aren't going to get bigger.
They are, but you become so much more equipped to slay them back. So when I was growing up for like three years, so from the time I was eight to time I was like 12, we live in a $7 a month place. And what I call it is I'm always paying rent in that $7 a month home.
Every day of my life, I go back and revisit that place because that place made me. This Geranimal, that place made me this hard man. And then from that place, that place is hard work. That place is going back to the fundamentals of life.
The fundamentals of what made David Goggins, David Goggins. Going back in there, going back to the library of David Goggins. Studying even more than what I know. Taking that out, going back to where I'm at now, and then moving forward.
Difficult things make regular life less difficult. Because regular life can be confusing and little... things that go wrong and little problems that arise are exacerbated by the fact that you're not accustomed to dealing with hardship.
And it ain't going to come overnight. You're going to take a beating. You're going to take this.
You're going to get knocked out. You're going to get up and you're going to see if you've got the right thing, but you've got to work hard. I think any person, any human realizes that if you want some kind of a good outcome, you're going to have to work hard for it. And if you, and if you don't work hard for something, you're not going to get an outcome that's really worth much. There's things that you can control.
There's things you can't control. Now, I will tell you that human beings can control a lot more than they think they can. And oftentimes, people say, that's not my fault. There's nothing I can do about that. And more often than people think, there is something you can do about it.
You played a game with zero sleep. Zero sleep. Zero sleep. It's like, you know, kids.
You know, Natalia had a certain... health situation what have you and you're staying up all night and then you got to go out and perform because fans don't know teammates don't know nor do they care nor should they that you've been up all night you got to perform right and so um you just gotta just gotta go to work man You gotta lead by example. If you want your kids to do whatever it is they want to accomplish in life, you have to show them.
You can't. You got to show them and that's what I tried to do. Those early days, that little trench winning in the weeds, oftentimes gives you these huge advantages later on because you have more context than anyone else.
And so rather than lament them and hate the fact that you're going through it, remembering that these will be arrows that you put in the quiver that you're going to be using to slay the future bigger dragons. I find that consistency. Consistency is the key. And consistency doesn't always guarantee success. But if you're inconsistent, if you don't take those steps, you'll never be successful.
This world we live in is tough. It's tough. It will beat you down.
The world and the life that we live in is the ultimate competitor. It will try to take you out. It will find your weakness and it will just hammer you.
The advice I would give to my 20-year-old self would be to work. Work harder. You know, even when it feels like the work isn't matter, it will matter. You know, delayed does not mean denied.
Motivation is a feeling that comes and goes and it doesn't matter whether it's there or not. discipline is infinitely more important. So no matter how you feel, get up and do what you're supposed to do.
That's it. And that's discipline. That's not motivation. If you only did what you were supposed to do when you were motivated to do it, that's leaving it to chance.
But if you're disciplined, you go do what you're supposed to do. That's the way it works. What's more beneficial, in fact, can serve as a tremendous amplifier on all endeavors that you engage in, especially hard endeavors, is to A, not start layering in other sources of dopamine in order to get to the starting line, not layering in other sources of dopamine in order to be able to continue, but rather to subjectively start to attach the feeling of friction and effort to an internally generated reward system.
And this is not meant to be vague. This is a system that exists in your mind, that exists in the minds of humans for hundreds of thousands of years. You're here to live, not to sleep. And the problem with the vision of Mai Tai's on the beach is that, well, first of all, that's a vision of drug-induced unconsciousness. Second, it's only going to work for about a week.
Third, you're going to be a laughingstock in a month and depressed and aimless and goalless. No, that's not... You want a horizon of ever-expanding possibility. When you can learn to do things when you don't want to, when you don't feel like it... Tired?
When you can learn to push yourself to do them, that's when the world opens up to you. That's when success knocks at your door. But if you can't, you'll never succeed.
Because I guarantee you there is some guy out there who's working when he's tired. Who's working when he doesn't feel like it. Who's working when he doesn't want to.
And he's going to outwork you. No matter how much you improve, no matter how much you change who you are, it's not permanent. You'll just wake up and say, oh my god, man, you're David Goggins.
You break records. You do this. You do that.
People don't know. How are you able to just be so hard? I never turn the thing off.
Because once it turns off, I go right back to the David Goggins that is. And that's the guy that I'm constantly fighting every day.