David Goggins – When You Want To Quit.. DON'T QUIT | No Excuses, No Limits
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Where I got my work ethic from was the hours I had to spend learning this. When you sit down and you're not smart and you have a disability and you still want to be in the top of your class, I didn't want to just get by. When I realized that I can learn through hard work,

and I can beat the valedictorian in school but I got put in 10 hours more a day than he does. You know what kind of strength comes from that? When you're sitting down and that valedictorian is studying for an hour and you know I caught you. I caught you and I am dumb but I have the work ethic to catch you. That's where David Goggins got really invented. He was at a kitchen table with 20 spiral notebooks that were empty.

And then three months later, they were full. And when you can go through that, I still have them in my storage unit. You go through these spiral notebooks of your life and you realize this is how I learned. This is unbelievable. There's no miles. It's not about the miles. It's that having a discipline every day to say for me to learn this one math problem, it's going to take me 10 hours. And that's where it, and you realize through hard work,

You can outwork anybody, no matter how badass they are. But that's the part people don't want to dive into. These are the facts and they are undisputed. Your problems in your past aren't on anybody else's agenda. Not really. You may have a few people in your inner circle who care about what you're going through. But for the most part, no one gives a sh*t because they're dealing with their own issues and focused on their own lives.

I learned that the hard way on our drive from Buffalo to 117 South McGuire Street in Brazil, Indiana when I was eight years old, I assumed I was going to walk into the biggest pity party of all time. I expected balloons, cake, ice cream, and big warm hugs. Instead, it was as if all the pain and terror never happened. Sergeant Jack didn't deal in pity. He was out to heart my show.

and that's exactly what he did. Pity is a soothing balm that turns toxic. At first, when your family and friends commiserate with you and validate the reasons you have for grumbling about your circumstances, it lands like sympathy. But the more comfort pity brings you, the more external validation you'll crave and the less independent you will become, which will make it that much more difficult for you to gain any traction in life. That's the vicious cycle of pity. It

Look, I get it.

Life isn't fair or easy. A lot of us are doing a job that we don't want to do. We feel we are above the tasks coming our way and that the world or God or the fates have sentenced us to live in a box we do not belong in. When I was a night shift security guard at a local hospital, I felt that work was beneath me. So I showed up every night with a voice in my head screaming,

I don't want to be here and that infected everything about my life. I ate my feelings, blew up and slipped into a deep depression. I wanted a different life but my shitty attitude made it impossible to create one.

Every minute you spend feeling sorry for yourself is another minute not getting better another morning You miss at the gym another evening wasted without studying another day burn when you didn't make any progress towards your dreams ambitions and deepest desires The ones you've had in your head and heart your entire life every minute you spend feeling sorry for yourself is

Is another minute spent in the dungeon thinking about what you lost or the opportunities that have been snatched away or squandered, which inevitably leads to the Great Depression. When you're depressed, you are likely to believe that nobody understands you or your plight. I used to think that way.

But when Sergeant Jack banged that trash can lid inches from my ear in the morning, he was telling me I wasn't the only little boy who got whipped or suffered from toxic stress. Sometimes the emotions we feel are a product of the past. Sometimes we just don't want to get up at five and do hours of chores before school because it sucks. Sergeant Jack expected me to perform no matter what I'd been through or what time it was. In response, my feelings got hurt.

I started getting out of bed until the last possible moment half. Asked my way through my mornings as part of a mindless mopey rebellion. He didn't give a rat's ass. That grass still needed to be cut. The leaves needed to be raked and the weeds needed to be pulled. No matter how much I belly ached, this work needed to get done and it would get done by me. My feelings were costing me a ton of time because

no matter how i felt there was a task in front of me and that's all that mattered in the present moment the only thing that ever matters is the present moment yet too many people let their depression or regret hijack their day they let their feelings about the past hijack their lives perhaps their fiance left them at the altar or they got fired without cause guess what one day

They will pan back and realize that nobody f***ing cared about any of that but them. I don't care what you've been through. I can feel bad for you. I can have sympathy for you, but my sympathy won't get you anywhere. When I was a young damaged kid, feeling sorry for myself didn't help me. What helped was cleaning those white walls right the first time.

We cannot get time back, so we must be minute hoarders. The earlier I get up, the more I do. The less time I stay in pity party, feel sorry for myself land, the stronger I become.

and the more daylight I see between me and everyone else. When you separate yourself from the pack by cultivating the values and priorities that lead to greatness, mountains of adversity and hardship become speed bumps and that makes it easier to adapt to the road ahead and build a new life or sense of self you crave. I wanted that comfort zone that everybody looks for, that pat on the back. They don't want to hear all the bad shit. They want to hear everything that they're doing right.

And I realized that's what kept me in this world. That's what kept me in this world of not accomplishing anything. So what I did was I became that big, bad, nasty that you don't want to walk into at nighttime. I became the roughest critic in the world on myself. And that's what changed me. I literally saw myself in the mirror. I saw the truth versus saying, you know,

My dad did this to me from, you know, from beating me. Kids in school from calling me n***a did this to me. My life did this to me. My f***ing broken foundation did this to me. I took that and said, you know what? Well, some people may help this happen, but now I have to own this. No one's going to come back to save me. No one's going to come back on this f***ing couch and say, hey, it's okay. You're going to be okay. No, I'm not.

I'm not going to be okay. I had to realize I had to take a stand. I had to make a real stand. And it was painful to look at who I was, what the world and myself created. It created a very lonely, depressed, insecure man that would do anything just to have a friend.

And I saw that as very pathetic. When you look at the truth, it becomes very ugly and pathetic. When I went to live with Sergeant Jack, I was forced to adapt extremely fast. Everyone was hard on me my whole life, but I came out of all that with lessons learned that stuck with me. Those who learn to adapt survive and thrive. Don't feel sorry for yourself. Get strategic. Attack the problem.

When you adapt, you will begin to see everything that comes your way as a stepping stone on your progression toward a higher plane. High paying, esteemed jobs are generally not entry level. You have to start somewhere, but most people see the thankless tasks that must be completed in order to advance as burdens instead of opportunities. That makes it impossible for them to learn. You've got to find the lesson in every shitty task or low wage job.

That requires humility. I wasn't humble enough to appreciate my experience in security, so my attitude was foulest. I thought I deserved much better, oblivious to the fact that almost everybody starts at the bottom and from there it's attitude and action that determine the future. Humility is the antidote to self-pity. It keeps you rooted in reality and your emotions in check.

I'm not suggesting you should be satisfied with an entry-level job. I'm never satisfied. But you must appreciate what you have while staying hungry enough to learn everything you can. You need to learn to wash the dishes, flip the burgers, sweat over the deep fryer, sweep up the job site, work in the mailroom, and answer the phones. That's how you build proficiency. It's important to learn every aspect of any business before you move up. You can't rise if you're weighed down by bitterness and entitlement.

Humility hardens your spine and encourages you to stand tall, secure in yourself no matter what anyone else thinks. And that has tremendous value. I once heard a story about a master sergeant in the army named William Crawford that exemplifies the power of humility. He retired in 1967.

and took a job as a janitor at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The cadets he cleaned up after paid him little mind, in part because he was reportedly painfully shy, but also because these cadets were elite students on an officer track and Master Sergeant Crawford was just a janitor, or so they thought. They had no clue that he was also a war hero

In September 1943, the 36th Infantry Division was getting blitzed by German machine gun fire mortars during a pivotal Second World War battle for a piece of Italian real estate known as Hill 424.

The Americans were pinned down with no escape route until Crawford spied three machine gun nests and crawled beneath rivers of bullets to toss a grenade into each of them. His bravery saved lives and allowed his company to advance to safe ground, and after the third direct hit, the Germans abandoned Hill 424, but not before they took Crawford prisoner. Presumed to be killed in action, tales of his heroism spread among infantrymen and traveled up the chain of command.

In 1944, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest decoration in the U.S. Military. Because everyone thought he was dead, his father accepted the medal on his behalf. Later that same year, he was found in a liberated POW camp, oblivious to the hype surrounding his name. In 1976, an Academy cadet and his roommate read about that battle and connected the dots. Their humble janitor had won the Medal of Honor.

Can you imagine what went through their heads? The Medal of Honor speaks to everything a military person reveres. Not the medal itself, but the courage and selflessness inside the human being who earned that medal. Those students wanted to be him. And there he was, mopping their floors and cleaning their bathrooms every day. Master Sergeant Crawford was a walking lesson in self-esteem, courage, character, and especially humility. The way I see it,

Master Sergeant William Crawford had figured it the out. The Medal of Honor didn't change him. He rose to prominence by staying humble and risking his own life to save others and retired into the service of others. It was never about him and that gave him strength. People who feel sorry for themselves are obsessed with their own problems and their own fate.

Is that really much different than the greedy and egotistical people who want to feel better than everybody else? The higher I climb in my life, the more I realize how much I need to mop that floor. Because that's where all the knowledge is. There is no grit at the top, no test of resolve in steak dinners, five-star hotels or spa treatments. Once you make it in this world, you have to free fall back to the bottom in some way to keep learning and growing.

I call this trained humility. It's a shedding of your skin that allows you to take on a mission that no one else can see and do whatever needs to be done next. Trained humility is service, but also strength. Because when you are humble enough to remember that you'll never know it all, each lesson you learn only makes you hungrier to learn more.

And that will put you on a path that guarantees you will grow all the way to the grave. I started figuring out going through BUDZ was that the harder something is, the more it was challenging my mind. So I had to find different ways to stay in the fight. And staying in the fight, it got me tougher and tougher and tougher. So I'm actually happy I went through three hell weeks. I never examined myself.

As a human being, you got to examine yourself. And I guess the best place to examine yourself is Navy SEAL Hell Week. So I got to examine myself a few times. So it started there. It started in Hell Week. And it's still going now at 43 years old.

Adelassian.com.

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