Turn Your Pain Into Fuel - David Goggins

Where nobody's at. That's where victory's at. We're over there in that corner. So this voice was giving me all these answers. Not I wasn't a real smart kid growing up, but I had this crazy voice in my head saying, over there is where the fucking answers are.

And I didn't want to listen to it because over there was pain. Over there was me looking in the mirror. Over there was me being accountable for all these things that went through my life. Even though people put them on me, it's now mine to own. And I didn't want to go over there by myself. But I had to. And this voice was guiding me there. I don't it's God, whatever you want to call it. Um, but that's what that's what it was in me. Life is one big psychological warfare that you play on yourself.

You play on yourself, man. The most important conversation I ever had mys with is is with myself. And the shit I was telling myself was so fucked up. It was so wrong. It was so misguided. And other people start to write that dialogue for you also. And it starts to be what you say to yourself every single day. And I started creating a whole nother warfare, a whole nother battle started becoming I was like, oh hang on a second, God. You have these tools.

Do you have these tools? Your life was basically the perfect the perfect grounds for training for where you need to go in your life. All the beatings, all the all the bullying. All the, you know, you going through uh learning disabilities, all the struggles. It was the absolute perfect training ground for you to go to where you need to go. And that's how I started looking at my life versus what was me, poopy pants, kicking rock down the street mentality. It was not.

God just hooked you right the fuck up. He hooked you right up, man, with the perfect place. You were training. You have the advantage of everybody else versus, my God, they're so above me. They came from a great family. Mom and Dad love'em. They didn't have a learn they didn't start or they didn't struggle. No, man, your struggle is what made you who you are now. Self discipline is everything. And if you don't have it, I I don't look at you right'cause I know you're capable of more.

It's not discipline so much for me. It's all on you. It's all on you. The self part is what's big. We need uh someone to hold hold people accountable. Fuck that shit, man. Fuck that shit. We count on people too much to get us through shit. And we look to our right, we look to our left, we're looking for help. And if you can build that self

you can build that total accountability in oneself. And it's not about being selfish. I'm trying to create a better me. So hopefully people who are hearing this are taking it the right way can say I can run a mile. It ain't about running 205 fucking miles through and fourth being a city. Ain't about all that shit. Shit doesn't matter. I want you to see how fucking far you can go. And that's all it's about yourself. And that's where it all comes from. No one's gonna fucking come to help me.

No one's gonna fucking come to help me. It's it's fucking me against me, period. And um so I had the man up and I said the first thing I start doing is facing every fucking fear I have. No matter what the fuck it is, man. And and these things would keep me up at night. No one pe people who are hearing this shit, they they will never really understand and grasp when you face these things and so many things, how they keep you up and haunt you at night. I had two options.

Be that three hundred pound guy who's prayed for cockroaches and made a thousand dollars a month. And at twenty four years old, knowing when I'm fifty fucking years old, I can reflect on this and think about what guy I never became, or I can totally just sack it up and fail and fail and fail until I succeed.

So I started calling recruiters up. I said, I'm gonna go be a fucking Navy SEAL. Most people are missing something because they don't know who they are. They never examine themselves. They've never done this experiment on themselves. The lab rat, we're all lab rats, but you're also the scientists. You create your own self. Most people are missing something because there's so much trap.

In there. I want you, I didn't want to say potential. I think that's word is used out too much too. There's so much in you that God, or wherever the hell you believe in, or if you're atheist in you that you have not unlocked.

Versus saying man I just can't do that so you limit this box so your box becomes so small of things you can do my box wasn't even a box It was a fucking little like little pinhole. And then through examining myself, getting some willpower, some courage. It became bigger than this table. But that's what we all do. That's why I wanted to come here today and talk to you about real shit. Not no fucking like hacks. There's no hacks, bro. It's you against you.

You against you. And if you misunderstand that You've a real problem. Real problem. I can understand you misunderstand me running down the street, shirt off, fuck this, nah yeah. I can I can get it. I get it. If you misunderstand what I'm saying right now, today, the problem is you. And you don't want to fix it. It developed a lot of anger and I still have it. And it will never go away.

Because when you put yourself in the sewer like I was in, and please, if someone saved me, come out and announce it to the world. There's no one. There's no one. So when you know that, and then I'm sitting at a table with all these smart people who are telling me what to do and shit and guiding me through my life now, I don't need you to guide my future.

I know what's good for me and what's bad for me. And for me, it took every bit of focus I could. And I know social media, that's why people love to go on there. Because they want to show you the good side of life. I'm not teaching good side of life. So I had to figure out a way when I came on in two thousand sixteen of teaching you

What life really is for the majority of us is hell. And so while people love to show you the cars and the house and the vacations and shit, all that's good. All that's happy. I'm gonna show you Decide that I know most of you're going through. And people hide very well. I don't want to hide anymore. I hid for 24 fucking years. I'm going to teach you how to be vulnerable.

That's the only way you fix yourself. You don't fix yourself by coming out here and me selling you some fucking books. That's why I don't have them. I forgot them. I'm glad people got something from the book. I want you to learn that the only way you grow is how to look at yourself and say, okay, like I did, what the fuck I have to do to get some. There was nothing good on there.

Nothing. Yeah, I love playing basketball. I left that out. That's something I love to do. I don't care about that. That didn't make the fucking list. Because the list that I had to live by was it was the very list that was to get me at this table with you. And a lot of us have this voice in our head. We all know that voice in our head that tells us the truth every single day that we try to run away from that says we're scared of this, let's go this way.

It started gnawing at me so horribly bad that it wouldn't allow me to live anymore without facing me. I had to go back in the dungeon. So when I tell my story, I tell it on a very surface level. I had to go down in the dungeon, the sewer where my mind used to be at, and talk to that guy. Because I I I wanted to live my life in a way that when I died, I was proud of myself. I knew what pride felt like. And if it took

pushing myself to death, I was willing to do that. But I want to look in that mirror, not impress anybody, not money, not fame, not nothing. I wanted to impress the guy in the daggone mirror. And I worked endlessly and tirelessly to do that. And

You have to judge yourself against yourself.

And that's the one thing I started learning, man. This isn't a race against me and Rich Roll. This is a race against David Goggins and David Goggins alone. And once you can silence all that bullshit, all the outside interference and things that are attracting your mind to everything, you can then start to grow in realizing I'm stressed out for no reason. This is my own little race, said

This is my own timeline and this is how I'm gonna run it. You're willing to suffer and suffer and go back in the grind. That internal dialogue you have with yourself when you're in misery and you're uncomfortable, it's a real scary Unfiltered, no-lying dialogue between you and yourself. And people know exactly what the fuck I'm talking about when you're in a bad spot in life and your mind is saying all kind of shit. That's who you really are.

That's the real you. No Rocky Bob Boa moments going on up there. Like, hey, you know, it's a round 14. Let's come on. We got this. No, it's like fuck this. I'm out of here, man. This is crazy. That's where the growth happens. When you're able to stay in that moment and talk to yourself, talk yourself back into the socks. Of wherever you're going through, and you start stripping those layers away, but as you're stripping those layers away, you're building calluses.

Over top of shit in your mind. That's where the growth starts to happen. Is when you have to force yourself to stay in it. You can't, you can't leave it. Every day is the first time. And live like that. To be better. And I put it this way. I'm in the water. The water's going over my head. The Pacific Ocean. You know it's freezing. February, cold as shit. Been through three hell weeks.

For you to constantly win, win, win, when this voice over here, the real you, is saying, get the fuck out of here. Go. You're nobody. You've always been nobody. And it's true. People don't hear that. That's a true voice. That's the real reality of David Goggins. At twenty-four years old. It's not a false reality. And then you had to create another voice over here. Of saying you're better than that other voice. And you're in the freezing cold water that both voices don't want to fucking be in.

But you win. And goes from the water to the studying to the running to losing weight to how you eat to how you function as a man. Every day of your life you're winning these battles. And the thing about it is You you you have to be really and sometimes all the voices are telling you the wrong shit, man. But through years, years, not a podcast or listening to a book or reading a book, years.

Of sacrifice, of suffering, of diligent, pinpoint fucking work on what you want to do for yourself. Not like, oh, let me just do a bunch of shit. Let me, I want to be in every task possible. No. Pinpoint what I want to do with my life. What happens is you have all these voices. That telling you you're fucked up and this is gonna be hard. But for some reason, you put so much practice into you.

That you can ignore every one of them that are telling you you're not gonna fucking make it and still be able to fucking make it. Because you have put the practice in that you know this is the process. It's such a daunting task that all the voices are saying. But you still had the conviction that I know I can do this. And that's what it took for me to get here. Twenty thirty years ago, thirty so twenty five years ago. Ever since then, every voice was like, You're a fucking nut.

But when you put that practice in every day you lace them up, and I mean run. It's just a metaphor for life. When you lace them motherfuckers up every day, pretty soon you win. Pretty soon you'll fuck. There's so much peace in knowing what I've accomplished and what I've done. I found peace years ago. Years ago. In the battle, in the battle, you find peace. When you go to war with yourself, you find a lot of peace. Because you know exactly who you are.

And that is where the peace is really found for me.