David Goggins – THE MINDSET OF A WINNER! (No Excuses, Just Discipline)
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On the other side of that extreme place that I call suffering, call whatever you want, there's a whole nother world that people have not even examined. But you have to go to that extreme place to examine it. You want to stay here in this comfortable place. Once you're willing to push yourself to that extreme place, it's like a whole nother universe. It's almost like you're an astronaut and you've examined something like up and out of space. No, it's always been there. But you have to be going through all the muck and all the...

It's examining, you realize, "Why God, do all this crap? There's a whole other universe over here in my mind." Yeah, yeah. A whole other universe. The road to success is rarely a straight line. For me, it's always been more like a maze. Many times when I thought I'd finally cracked the code, had it all figured out and found the straight path to certain victory, I hit a wall or got spun into a turnaround. When that happens, we have two choices. We can stay stuck or regroup back up and try again.

That's where evolution begins. Hitting those walls time and again will harden and streamline you. Having to back up and formulate a new plan without any assurances it will ever pan out will tune your say up and develop your problem. Solving skills and your endurance, it will force you to adapt. When that happens hundreds of times,

Over the course of many years, it is physically exhausting and mentally draining, and it becomes damn near impossible to believe in yourself or your future. A lot of people abandon belief at that point. They swirl in the eddies of comfort or regret, perhaps claim their victimhood and stop looking for their way out of the maze. Others keep believing and find a way out, but hope to never slip into a trap like that ever again.

and those skills they'd honed and developed with her. They lose their edge. I am always on the hunt for another twisted pretzel of a maze to get lost in because that's where I find myself. The smooth road to success is of no use to savages like me. That may sound ideal, but it won't test us. It doesn't demand belief, so it will never make us great. We all build belief in different ways.

I clock countless hours in the gym where I log thousands of reps and run and ride my bike obscene distances to cultivate belief. Despite what you may think, I don't consider myself an ultra athlete because those races are not who I am.

There are tools. Each one provides me a stockpile of faith. So when I get stuck in the maze of life like a broke down savage, I still believe I'm capable of achieving my unreasonable goals, such as becoming a smokejumper at 47 years old, no matter what society or the good doctor says. I don't mean to suggest that you must run 100 or 200 miles to believe you have what it takes to get where you want to go.

That's what I had to do based on the depth of the darkness I came from and the scale of my ambitions. But if you've lost it, you do need to find your way back to belief. Whatever it takes for you to believe that you're better than good enough to achieve your dreams is what you must do. And remember, your greatness is not tied to any outcome. It is found in the valiance of the attempt.

We have a theorist and we have a practitioner. The theorist is a person that's gonna sit back and read books from a library that someone else wrote. They become real smart about what someone else wrote, okay? A practitioner as a man is me. I put myself in hell.

lived in it for a long time and figured out how the human mind works while being, while suffering, while in pain, while in misery. And that's how I wrote my book. I want to tell you exactly what your mind is thinking. Most of us don't stay in hell long enough to write the book. I stayed in long enough to write it and finish the book. My crew was one of four on standby when the winds picked up and thunderheads blew across northern British Columbia.

We were on our satellite base in McKenzie when the call came in mid-morning that there had been a lightning strike and a 3-Acri fire was burning outside of Fort Nelson. Although I'd graduated rookie training, you aren't officially a smokejumper until you jump your first fire, and I was about to be baptized. Our three-man crew hopped into the DC-3, a refurbished World War I relic, with three other crews, enough firefighting gear to put the burn down.

and two days of food and water. We flew for 90 minutes until we reached the billowing black smoke and leveled off at 1500 feet. The streamers flew and the spotter pointed out an overgrown pipeline corridor no more than 20 feet across, roughly a quarter mile from the flames. That was the DZ. Kneeling in the open doorway, the spotter shouted the wind drift and the hazard run down over the roar of the propellers. Roger that, I thought.

"Am I clear?" I hollered. The plane rattled and shook. It was so loud I could barely hear myself think. My pounding heart sent a flood of adrenaline rocketing through me. Locked into the static line, I stepped to the door, grabbed the outside edges with both hands, and flung myself into the sky in time to watch a teammate's parachute bloom 150 feet below me. Once my chute opened, the rumble of the propellers and wild hiss of the wind melted to a peaceful whisper.

I looked down, located my D's, identified all the hazards, and took in the full scope of the fire. There was danger in every direction, yet all I saw was beauty. My body had failed me for eight years straight. I could have given up a dozen different times at least. Many late nights and early mornings, my doubt was louder than that DC-3. I had to sit with that doubt, stare into it, and more often than not,

I had no answers, no good reason to think I would ever get here because I kept falling short for one reason or another. It's easier to overcome doubt that you've built up in your mind. It's much harder when you know you failed more than once and that the odds of success are slim. But because of the way I live and thanks to the mindset I work hard to cultivate, I had enough belief left to try one more time. I'll never forget when I was younger and I lived in a seven-dharma place and everything was jacked up. I had a pair of jeans.

And every, I'll never forget this as long as I live. You know, first day of school, people go school shopping, right? Week out, two weeks out, maybe a month out. We didn't have any money to do that. So I had this pair of jeans that the inside of the pocket was green. The inside of the pocket was green. And I wore them almost every day. So what I did for the next year of school was I cut that pocket out so the green would show. So it looked like a new pair of jeans. All I wanted was money. All I wanted was a nice car, was a nice home.

The second I got the money to do it, I realized, that's why I don't own a car. I don't own a place. Nothing. What I realized is all I wanted in my life was look at that accountability mirror and be proud of. And everything else went away. While you need money to be successful, you need money to live, you need money. Money does buy a form of happiness because without it, you're miserable. But once I realized it doesn't mean shit.

It doesn't mean for me. What makes you happy achievement reaching goals accomplishing things that I thought were impossible to accomplish because Well, I don't smile all the time There's this feeling inside of me that no one very few people have very few people have because When you come from where I came from nothing and you make something out of nothing the feeling that stays with you day long

It allows you to be who you want to be in front of anybody. Nothing in my life has ever happened for me on the first try. It took me three cracks to get through Navy SEAL training. I had to take the AFBAT five times and fail twice before breaking the Guinness World Record for most pull-ups in 24 hours. But by then, failure had long since been neutralized. When I set an unreasonable goal and fall short, I don't even look at it as failure anymore.

It is simply my first, second, third, or tenth attempt. That is what belief does for you. It takes failure out of the equation completely because you go in knowing the process will be long and arduous. And that is what the f*** we do. I wish I could more fully express what it's like to defy the medical mind to parachute into wildfires at 47 years old.

I find the sensation almost impossible to describe. All I can say is that I hope you and everyone else get to feel this one day because to overcome all obstacles and bump up against the outer reaches of your capabilities is the pinnacle in those rare fleeting moments when you are washed in the sense of infinite possibility and overwhelmed with glory. Everything they ever did to you or put in front of you

All the knockdowns, breakdowns and f*** yous and every bit of the pain, doubt and humiliation. It's f***ing worth it. But the only way to get there is to continually seek greatness and always be willing to try one more time. I never needed to be the hardest mother f***er in the world. That became a goal because I knew it would bring out my best self, which is what this f***ed up world needs from all of us.

to evolve into the very best versions of ourselves. That's a moving target and it isn't a one-time task. It is a lifelong quest for more knowledge, more courage, more humility, and more belief. Because when you summon the strength and discipline to live like that, the only thing limiting your horizons is you. Your brain is the most powerful weapon in the world.

Once you put away your phones and your computers and all that we have nowadays, that's great. We're up to date. But your brain is the only thing you have when you're going through depression, when you're going through hard times, you're going through death. Real life, you can't Google that, man.

You're alone. You're alone. You may have a shrink you're going to. You may have a best friend you're going to. But there's 24 hours in a day where you're alone in this brain. And your brain is talking to you in all kind of ways. And it wants to control you and pull you in these different pockets. If you can't control your own brain and your brain controls you, you got to tell your brain where you want to go and how you want to go and how you want to get there. You got to control it. If not, it's over.

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