BEFORE YOU OVERTHINK, Stop and Hear THIS - David Goggins Motivation
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You start putting yourself in situations that suck, you'll find yourself. You'll find it real quick. It's the only way to find yourself. You don't find yourself. If you like bench pressing and you bench press all the time, what are you finding out? If you like to swim, that's all you want to do is swim. What are you finding out? Put that, you know, people always, people talk about triple down on your strengths. That's the weakest in the world. No, triple down on your weaknesses. Find out something about yourself. You already know the good. You already know the happy shit.

That's why on my Facebook page, everybody goes, why don't you talk about good times? You know how to get through that, motherfucker. You don't need no one to tell you how to get through. It's happy. That's easy. I'm going to tell you how you can help yourself get through the times that suck. Real life. This is real life. 90% of your life will suck. 10% will be fucking happy. You may be a lucky guy and have a lot of fucking money, have a great ass woman, all this shit.

trust me one-on-one with that guy he's missing something his life still sucks because he hasn't faced something that bothered him his whole life something is still eating that up almost everybody everybody eating you the up but maybe you found a good way how i did growing up on how to ignore that voice as saying you ain't facing some period man i'm not special i just stopped listening i i listened to that voice

This is why I talk so f***ing aggressive. People say, "Man, do you believe in God? You cuss so much." When I say f***, it's letting you know what I'm thinking. If I try to make it all pretty and sh**, that's not what my life was. It was a violent, violent struggle daily to get where I'm at today. I'm not gonna water it down. I'm not gonna water it down. This sh** wasn't fun. It ain't fun today, but I'm happy. I was 24 years old when I realized I was broken inside.

something had gone numb in my soul and that numbness, that lack of deep feeling dictated what my life had become. It's why I quit going after my goal, my biggest dream whenever things got hard. Quitting was just another detour. It never bothered me much because when you're numb you can't process what's happening to you or within you. I didn't know the power of the mind yet

And because of that, I had ballooned into a fat ass and taken a job as a cockroach sniper in restaurants. I had my excuses, of course. My numbness was a survival mechanism. It had been beaten into me by my father. By the time I turned seven, I developed a pal mindset. Going numb was how I took my beatings and maintained some level of self-respect.

Even after my mother and I escaped, I continued to be stalked by tragedy and failure. And numbness was how I coped with the fact that losing was all I ever knew. When you're born a loser, your goal is to survive, not thrive. You learn to lie, to cheat, to do what it takes to fit in. You may become a survivor.

but it's a miserable existence. Just like the cockroaches I was assigned to kill, you find yourself scurrying in from the shadows to claim the bare necessities while hiding your true self from the light at all costs. Born losers are the ultimate cockroaches. We do what we have to, and that attitude often enables some pretty severe character defects. I certainly had some.

I was a quitter, a liar, a fat lazy mother and I was deeply depressed. I could feel myself unraveling a little at a time. Fed up and frustrated, bitter and angry, I couldn't take much more of my sorry ass life. If I didn't change and change soon, I knew I would die a loser or worse. I might end up like my father, the hustler who was one quick twitch away from violence.

I was consumed by misery and groping for some mental foothold to keep me from giving up for good. The only thing I could come up with was to go back to that house on Paradise Road that still haunted me. I had to get to Buffalo, New York and look my father in the eye. Because when you're living in hell, the only way to find your way out is to confront the devil himself. I was hoping to find some answers that would help me change my life. That was what I told myself anyway.

As I crossed into Ohio from Indiana and veered northeast, I hadn't seen my old man in 12 years. It had been my decision to stop seeing him. At that time, the court system allowed children to make those decisions once they turned 12. I made that choice mostly out of respect for and loyalty to my mom. He'd stop beating us after we left Buffalo, but the one thing that never went numb was how I felt about what my mother endured at his hands.

Still, over the years, I had questioned that decision and began to wonder if my memories, if the stories I told myself were true. On the long drive, I didn't listen to music. All I heard were the competing voices in my head. The first voice accepted me as I was. "It's not your fault, David. None of this is your fault. You're doing the best you can with what you've been given." That was the voice I'd been listening to my entire life.

"It's not my fault" was my favorite refrain. It explained and justified my lot in life and the dead end path in front of me. And it played 24/7. However, for the first time, another voice chimed in. "Roger that. It ain't your fault that you were dealt a bad hand, but it is your responsibility. How long will you allow your past to hold you back before you finally take control of your future?"

compared to the first, more nurturing voice in my head. This one was ice cold, and I did my best to tune it out. The closer I got to Buffalo, the younger and more helpless I felt. When I was 150 miles away, I felt like I was 16 years old. As I pulled off the highway and wound through the Buffalo City streets, I felt like I was eight.

the same age I was when we packed all our sh*t into garbage bags and walked out the door. Once I walked into the house, it was August 1983 all over again. The paint on the walls, the floors, the appliances, and the furniture, all of it was the same. While it looked a lot smaller and out of date, it was still the haunted house I remembered.

filled with years of grisly memories and palpable dark energy. However, my father was warm and more affectionate than I remembered. Trunas was always a charmer, and he acted genuinely happy to see me.

As we caught up, I found myself laughing at his jokes, slightly confused by the man in front of me. After a while, he checked his watch and grabbed his coat. He held the front door open for his wife, Sue, and me as we headed for the car. Where are we going? I asked. You remember the schedule? He said. It's time to open up. The first thing I noticed about Skateland from the outside was that it needed a paint job.

Inside, the floor and walls were chipped and stained, and the whole place smelled funky. The office had deteriorated too. That sofa we slept on as kids, where my mom caught him cheating on more than one occasion, still hadn't been replaced. It was filthy as hell, and that's where I sat after the grand tour while my father headed upstairs to spin hip-hop records in the Vermillion Room. I felt dizzy and disoriented.

It was strange how far the old man had let his standards slip. He wasn't the strong, exacting, demanding figure I'd remembered. He was old, weak, soft in the middle, and lazy. He didn't even appear to be that mean anymore. He wasn't the devil at all. He was human. Had I been feeding myself a false history,

As I lingered in that office, steep in the past, I wondered what else I'd been wrong about. Then, at around 10 o'clock, the boss line dropped upstairs and the ceiling started to shudder and shake. Within seconds, I heard hollering laughter and that steady stomping to the beat. In the same way, a song can take you back to a distinct time and place,

That thumping bass returned me to my darkest days. I'd been funneled into a relapse of my childhood nightmare. I closed my eyes and saw myself as a first grader tossing and turning on that very couch, trying to sleep after working all night and not being able to get more than a wink. My mother was there too, struggling to paper over our pain with home cooked dinners prepared on portable electric burners in the cramped office.

I saw the helplessness and fear in her eyes, and it brought back all the stress, pain, frustration, and depression that came with it. Those memories were real. There was no denying it. I was disgusted to be sitting on that couch. I was sickened to have let my guard down and enjoyed my father's company, even for a few minutes. I felt like I was doing a disservice to my mother.

And the longer I sat there and watched the ceiling shake, the more rage rose up inside until I was on my feet and racing up a back stairwell into the vermillion room where my demon was slurping whiskey, the smoky elixir that gave him his power. As a kid, I rarely saw the space in full bloom. And while it had lost most of its shine, it was still happening.

What was once a glitzy nightclub serving funk to a well-dressed crowd had become a packed dive bar flush with hip hop. Tronis was in the DJ booth orchestrating the energy, spinning records, and sucking down scotch after scotch until closing time.

I watched him work, drink, and flirt. And the more wasted he became, the more my memory synced with reality. After locking up, I drove us all to Denny's for an after-hours breakfast, just like old times. More than 15 years had passed, yet the ritual remained the same as ever. Tronus was sloppy as hell by then, and he could tell it made me uncomfortable, which ticked him off.

While we waited for our food, he glared at me as he dissed my grandparents and claimed they were responsible for the breakup of his family. Liquor always brought his ugliness out, and I'd heard that argument so many times before. It didn't have much effect on me, but when he started in on my mom, I wasn't having any of it. Don't go there, I said quietly, but he didn't care. He barked about how everyone turned on him and how weak and sorry we all were.

His spittle flew. The vein in his temple throbbed. "Trunis, please stop," Sue said. There was something in her tone, a mixture of fear and dread that I recognized. She wasn't standing up and telling him how she felt. She was pleading with him. It reminded me so much of my mother and how powerless she felt when Trunis would rage on and on.

He was the type of guy who would call a woman over the house at 3:55 p.m. Knowing my mom would be coming home at 4 o'clock. He wanted her to catch them in the act to show her that he had all the power and would do whatever the he wanted at any time of day or night. It's the same reason he beat me in front of her and did the same to her in front of me. The very same day we left, Sue moved in, yet he often told her

and anyone else who would listen how beautiful and smart my mother was as if she were the one who got away he needed sue to feel she wasn't good enough for him and never would be for the first time in my life i felt for sue and realized that tron's specialty was the weaponization of disrespect

It was a tactic he used to bully women and children into submission. He knew that once he choked a mother out mentally, they would lose all their fight and self-respect, which would make it easier to manipulate and dominate them. That's what he was after, not love. He craved dominance and subservience. It was like oxygen to him. He harvested souls with violence and rage.

He wanted the people closest to him to feel wounded and empty. Decades later, my mother still struggles with self-respect, decision-making, and confidence. Truna's face was red from alcohol. His jaw clenched with tension as he kept talking. There was no doubt that he was the bully and abuser I remembered, but not because he hated my mom or Sue or my brother or me, but because he was a sick,

up old man who didn't believe he was worth a damn and could not and would not help himself. Years later, I would learn that he had suffered abuse when he was a kid. His father made him stand in front of a flaming hot coal furnace in a dark room. And after a torturous waiting period, his dad would show up with a belt and lash him buckle side first.

If he moved away from the belt, he'd get burned. So he had to accept his father's lashings and try not to move. He never dealt with his trauma. Those memories festered into demons. And before he even knew it had happened, the victim became the abuser. Whenever he got drunk and the party died down, he self-soothed by picking on people weaker than him. He beat them up. He ran them down. Sometimes he threatened to kill them.

But as soon as an abusive episode was over, he would erase it from history. The beatings we took never happened. He liked to think of himself as a big man, but never accepted responsibility for anything he did that went wrong, which didn't make him any kind of a man at all. I suppose I was in that Denny's booth with him because part of me was hoping Tronis would apologize, but he didn't think he had anything to be sorry for.

He was straight up delusional and his delusions demoralized all of us. They were also contagious. For years, he made me bleed and he made me doubt myself. He transferred his demons to me through the lashes of his leather belt and the open palm of his hand. And like him, I grew up believing in delusions. I hadn't become an evil sociopath, but like him,

I never took responsibility for my own shortcomings or my failures. Sitting there listening to him rave made my blood run hot. Sweat beaded on my forehead and all I could think about was payback. It was his turn to suffer at my hands. I wanted to make him bleed for my pain. I wanted to beat that motherfucker down right there in Denny's.

I was hair-triggered close to allowing my father to turn me into a violent maniac, just like I remembered him to be. He recognized the fire in my eyes because it was as if he were looking into a mirror and it scared the sh*t out of him. The weather changed in our booth. He stopped ranting mid-sentence. His eyes went glassy and wide and in the fluorescent light of the diner, he looked meek and small.

I nodded as I recognized in that very moment the lie that inspired my trip to Buffalo. I hadn't driven all the way from Indianapolis as some first step towards self-improvement. No, I was there looking for a free pass. I went to collect more evidence that all my many failures and disappointments stemmed from the same root cause.

My father, Tronis Goggins. I'd been hoping that everything I believed all those years was true because if Tronis was indeed the devil in disguise, that gave me someone to blame and I was looking for a cop out. I needed Tronis to be the flaw in my existence in order to claim the lifetime warranty on my get out of jail free card. Tronis was flawed all right.

He showed me that all over again, but he wasn't my flaw. The second voice was right. Unless I took responsibility for my demons, the ones he put on me, I had no shot at becoming anything other than a perpetual loser or another miserable hustler like him. When the food arrived, Tronus stuffed his face while I reflected on how much power I'd given him over the years.

It wasn't his fault I experienced racism or barely graduated high school. Yes, he beat me and my brother up and tortured my mother. He was a f***ed up man, but I hadn't lived with him since I was eight years old. When was I going to take my soul back from him? When was I going to own my own choices, my failures, my future?

When would I finally accept responsibility for my life, take action, and wipe the slate clean? Nobody said a word while I drove us back to Paradise Road. Trunis watched me with a mix of drunken sadness, loss, and anger as I grabbed my car keys from the kitchen counter and walked straight out the door. I'd planned on spending the weekend, but I couldn't stand to be in his presence for one minute longer.

While the words were never spoken, I believe we both knew that would be the last time we would ever see each other. The funny thing was, I didn't even hate Tronis anymore because I finally understood him. On the drive back home, I turned the volume way down on the nurturing voice in my head.

and tuned into reality. In place of excuses, it was time for ownership of exactly who I'd become in all of its ugliness. And that meant acknowledging that my thin skin was definitely part of the problem. All of us are dealt circumstances in life we don't have any power to control. Sometimes those things are painful. Occasionally,

they are tragic or inhuman. While the accountability mirror, which I tagged with sticky notes filled with real talk, daily tasks, and a few bigger goals, had helped me get to a certain point, those fixes were surface level. I'd never attempted to dive down and solve the root cause of my problems, so I crumbled whenever life asked me to dig deeper and persevere

In order to achieve something that could lead toward sustained success, I'd spent my entire life in surface waters, hoping that my luck would change and everything I dreamed of would fall into place for me. That night, on my drive home to Indiana, I accepted the hard truth that hoping and wishing are like gambling on long shots.

And if I wanted to be better, I had to start living every day with a sense of urgency because that is the only way to turn the odds in your favor. Reality can be a mother when all of your excuses are stripped away and you are exposed for exactly who and what you have become. But the truth can also be liberating. That night, I accepted the truth about myself.

I finally swallowed reality and now that I had my future was undetermined, anything was possible as long as I adopted a new mindset. I needed to become someone who refused to give in, who simply finds a way no matter what. I needed to become bulletproof, a living example of resilience. Think of a packet of seeds scattered in a garden.

Some seeds get more sunlight, more water, and are planted in nourishing topsoil. And because they are put in the right place at the right time, they can rise from seed to seedling to a thriving tree. Seeds planted in too much shade or that don't get enough water may never become anything at all unless someone transplants them, saves them,

before it's too late. Then there are those seedlings that look for the light on their own. They creep from the shade into the sunshine without being transplanted. They find it without anybody digging them up and placing them in the light. They find strength where there is none. That is resilience. Once we're born, our natural instinct is to look for ways to thrive, but not everybody does.

And sometimes there's a damn good reason for it. I was brought up in darkness. My roots were flimsy. I was barely tethered to rock hard ground. My spirit, soul and determination weren't nourished in the light. But on that ride home, I realized that only I have the power to determine my future.

and I had a choice to make. I could continue living in the haven of low expectations where it was comfortable and safe to believe that my life was not my fault or my responsibility and that my dreams were just that. Fantasies that would never be because time and opportunity were not and would never be on my side. Or I could leave all that behind for a world of possibility.

much more pain, unfathomably hard work, and zero guarantees of success. I could choose resilience. At 24 years old, a powerful force was gathering within me, waiting to be unleashed. I would soon call upon it to complete two Hell Weeks, become a member of the SEAL teams, and complete Army Ranger School. I'd compete in ultra races and break the world pull-up record.

Thanks to that one night in Buffalo, New York, when I accepted my fate and became determined to tap into my resilience, I found the will to transform myself into the grittiest motherfucker ever to find light where there was none. I had never been a pal like John McCain and countless others.

but I lived like a prisoner in my own mind for the first 24 years of my life. Once I'd liberated myself and begun to evolve, I learned that it is the rare warrior who embraces the adversity of being born into hell and then with their own free will chooses to add as much suck as they can find to turn each day into a boot camp of resiliency. Those are the ones who don't stop at good enough.

They aren't satisfied with just being better than they used to be. They are forever evolving and striving for the highest level of self. Eventually, I became one of them, which is why I was honored at the Vefdi Convention.

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