Discipline Yourself—And Take Back Control Like David Goggins Motivational Speech
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Every day, you know, it gets dusty. And every day, you don't start with the victories. You don't go, oh, this is nice. Look at my, I love me. Well, let me clean up this little dusty. No, I go right for the things that are going to keep me buried. I go right there first because if I don't clean those out first, the day doesn't start. So what he's saying to me is truth. And like I told you many times today, I can never figure out

how to explain this to people because I'm not neuro nothing. I'm just a guy that said, okay, we got to start in the dungeon and we got to stay here for the rest of our lives. For you to become successful, the dungeon is a place that has to be clean and it's the scariest place to be. That's why I'm misunderstood because I'm speaking from the dungeon. That's why I am successful because I go there every damn day. And that is the truth. What he says is the exact truth.

Those cabinets are dusty, dirty, and scary as broken glass, dark, spiders, cobwebs. But most of all, your biggest fears. The biggest things that put you in the place you are today are in there. That's why we all like to keep them shut. Even like to lock them up. Act like it never happens. We never grow. We never improve. We never have real conversations like we're having right now. Never.

Never. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's not. No, no, no. Let's not go there. I talk to so many people who tell me that. Let's talk about this because they'll tell me that they can only say it once and they'll say it in passing. They won't get deep in the weeds with it. Like you can't just clean it. You got to spit shine that mother. You got to relive it. Every detail of it. You can't say, oh, yeah, yeah, my dad beat me. You know, it is what it is.

It is what it is, motherfucker. It's killing you. It's taking over your whole fucking life. But that's the conversation. Yeah, my dad be like, I'm fine now, though. I'm good. Okay. All right. No, you ain't. You ain't fine. You ain't fine. This is real talk. People don't have that. So your boy's right. 100% right. Scary as shit. It's scary as shit. But it makes you who you're supposed to be. And that's the test. We forget. We think we're supposed to breathe air and have kids and

pay the bills and sh*t. Everyone's like, "What's this life about? That makes no sense." So being tested, my friend. Tests come when you have not studied. Tests come when you think that you're in a great place. That's the test. The test is every day of your life. And most of us fail because we don't know why we're here. Because we don't go inward to say, "Oh, you gave me a lot of sh*t to fix, man. And this test sucks." Then you start. I learned how to hold myself accountable.

and I knew I could take a man's soul in the heat of battle. I had overcome many obstacles and realized that each of those experiences had calloused my mind so thick I could take on any challenge. All of that had made me feel like I dealt with my past demons, but I hadn't. I'd been ignoring them. My memories of abuse at the hands of my father, of all those people who called me...

didn't vaporize after a few victories. Those moments were anchored deep in my subconscious. As a result, my foundation was cracked. In a human being, your character is your foundation. And when you build a bunch of successes and pile up even more failures on a f***ed up foundation, the structure that is the self won't be sound. To develop an armored mind, a mindset so calloused and hard that becomes bulletproof. You need to go to the source of all your fears and insecurities.

Most of us sweep our failures and evil secrets under the rug, but when we run into problems, that rug gets lifted up and our darkness reemerges, floods our soul, and influences the decisions which determine our character. My fears were never just about the water, and my anxieties toward Class 235 weren't about the pain of first phase. They were seeping from the infected wounds I'd been walking around with my entire life, and my denial of them amounted to a denial of myself.

I was my own worst enemy. It was the world or God or the devil that was out to get me. It was me. I was rejecting my past and therefore rejecting myself. My foundation and my character was defined by self-rejection. All my fears came from that deep-seated uneasiness I carried with being David Goggins because of what I'd gone through. Even after I'd reached a point where I no longer cared about what others thought of me, I still had trouble accepting me.

Anyone who is of sound mind and body can sit down and think of 20 things in their life that could have gone differently, where maybe they didn't get a fair shake.

and where they took the path of least resistance. If you're one of the few who acknowledge that, want to callous those wounds and strengthen your character, it's up to you to go back through your past and make peace with yourself by facing those incidents and all of your negative influences and accepting them as weak spots in your own character. Only when you identify and accept your weaknesses will you finally stop running from your past,

Then those incidents can be used more efficiently as fuel to become better and grow stronger. Right there on mom's couch as the moon burned its arc in the night sky, I faced down my demons. I faced myself. I couldn't run from my dad anymore. I had to accept that he was part of me and that his lying, cheating character influenced me more than I cared to admit. Before that night,

I used to tell people that my father had died rather than tell the truth about where I came from. Even in the seals I trotted out that lie. I knew why. When you get beat up, you don't want to acknowledge getting your ass kicked. It doesn't make you feel very manly. So the easiest thing to do is forget about it and move on. Pretend it never happened. Not anymore.

Going forward it became very important for me to rehash my life because when you examine your experiences with a fine-tooth comb and see where your issues come from you can find strength in enduring pain and abuse. By accepting Trinus Goggins as part of me I was free to use where I came from as fuel.

I realized that each episode of child abuse that could have killed me made me tough as hell and as sharp as a samurai's blade. It took several years for me to figure out who the devil was. And the devil was my father. The devil was my father, but what I didn't put and never finished was the devil really was me.

So what happened was I put all this blame and trust me, my father and a lot of people had to do with my upbringing on how it was. But like I put in that book, no one's going to come back and say, Hey man, I apologize. Maybe someone does. Very few people will. So at the end of the day, when all of these are said and done with,

While my dad was the devil, and I believed that for a long time, I had to confront him. And when I confronted the devil, so what I thought was the devil, I realized that I was the true devil. I was the one holding me back. I was the one looking for the scapegoat. And you know, I was the one looking for all these ways to say, "It's okay, David. You're a loser. You're a born loser, so it's okay." And I was hoping my dad was going to give me that confirmation

And he was a loser himself, but at the end of the day when I left there, I realized, "Man, this is all me. My dad's up, my mom's up, the people around me are up. They're not going to save you. You got to save yourself, my friend." So that's when all that reality hit me when I went to Buffalo to see my dad on that drive home. I was like, "Man, this rest of your life is going to suck. It is going to suck, not because you're going to be a loser, but because you're going to finally start to win."

And winning is not easy, my friend. I remembered as a kid, no matter how f***ed up our life was, my mother always figured out a way to stock our damn cookie jar. She'd buy wafers and Oreos, Pepperidge Farm Milanos and chips. And whenever she showed up with a new batch of cookies, she dumped them into one jar.

With her permission, we'd get to pick one or two out at a time. It was like a mini treasure hunt. I remember the joy of dropping my fist into that jar, wondering what I'd find. And before I crammed the cookie in my mouth, I always took the time to admire it first, especially when we were broke in Brazil. I'd turn it around in my hand and say my own little prayer of thanks. The feeling of being that kid

locked in a moment of gratitude for a simple gift like a cookie came back to me. I felt it viscerally and I used that concept to stuff a new kind of cookie jar. Inside it were all my past victories.

Like the time when I had to study three times as hard as anybody else during my senior year in high school just to graduate. That was a cookie. Or when I passed the ASVAB test as a senior and then again to get into BUDS. Two more cookies. I remember dropping over 100 pounds in under three months, conquering my fear of water, graduating BUDS at the top of my class.

and being named enlisted honor man in Army Ranger School. All those were cookies loaded with chocolate chunks. These weren't mere flashbacks. I wasn't just floating through my memory files. I actually tapped into the emotional state I felt during those victories, and in so doing accessed my sympathetic nervous system once again. My adrenaline took over. The pain started to fade just enough, and my pace picked up. I began swinging my arms and lengthening my stride.

My fractured feet were still a bloody mess, full of blisters, the toenails peeling off almost every toe. But I kept pounding, and soon it was me who was slaloming runners with pained expression as I raced the clock. From then on, the cookie jar became a concept I've employed whenever I need a reminder of who I am and what I'm capable of.

We all have a cookie jar inside us because life, being what it is, has always tested us. Even if you're feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success. It doesn't have to be a big victory either. It can be something small. I know we all want the whole victory today, but when I was teaching myself to read,

I would be happy when I could understand every word in a single paragraph. I knew I still had a long way to go to move from a third grade reading level to that of a senior in high school.

But even a small win like that was enough to keep me interested in learning and finding more within myself. You don't drop 100 pounds in less than three months without losing five pounds in a week first. Those first five pounds I lost were a small accomplishment. And it doesn't sound like a lot, but at the time it was proof that I could lose weight and that my goal, however improbable, was not impossible.

The engine in a rocket ship does not fire without a small spark first. We all need small sparks, small accomplishments in our lives to fuel the big ones. Think of your small accomplishments as kindling. When you want a bonfire, you don't start by lighting a big log. You collect some witch's hair, a small pile of hay, or some dry dead grass.

You light that and then add small sticks and bigger sticks before you feed your tree stump into the blaze. Because it's the small sparks which start small fires that eventually build enough heat to burn the whole forest down. If you don't have any big accomplishments to draw on yet,

So be it. Your small victories are your cookies to savor and make sure you do savor them. Yeah, I was hard on myself when I looked in the accountability mirror, but I also praised myself whenever I could claim a small victory because we all need that and very few of us take the time to celebrate our successes. Sure, in the moment we might enjoy them, but do we ever look back on them and feel that win again and again?

Maybe that sounds narcissistic to you, but I'm not talking about droning on and bullshitting about the glory days here. I'm not suggesting you crawl up your own ass and bore your friends with all your stories about what a badass you used to be. Nobody wants to hear that sh*t. I'm talking about utilizing past successes to fuel you to new and bigger ones. Because in the heat of battle, when sh*t gets real, we need to draw inspiration to push through our own exhaustion, depression, pain, misery.

We need to spark a bunch of small fires to become the mother inferno. But digging into the cookie jar when things are going south takes focus and determination because at first the brain doesn't want to go there. It wants to remind you that you're suffering and that your goal is impossible. It wants to stop you so it can stop the pain. That night in San Diego was the most difficult night of my life physically. I'd never felt so broken and there were no souls to take.

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