EMBRACE THE PAIN. NO EXCUSES, GET IT DONE - Unstoppable Motivation by David Goggins
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I realized that God wasn't going to give me a get out of jail free card. And from the time I was born into the time I was 19 years old, my life had these hurdles. I constantly hit obstacles, obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And I had to figure out how to manage suffering, how to deal with it, because it'd be part of my life forever. At least that's what I thought. So in order to deal with it,

I had to be able to conquer it and overcome it and deal with it and know that in this suffering there has to be some kind of growth. With every obstacle I look at it as friction now. Without friction there is no growth. You have to have friction in your life to grow. So I started looking at all these different things versus the woe is me mentality like oh my god look at my life, my life's so I come from this family, I'm being beaten, I'm being abused mentally, physically. I started looking at it as a perfect trial ground.

So I had to flip it upside down and say, "Okay, I'm suffering tremendously, mentally. Use this to your advantage versus your disadvantage." So that's what I did. Versus looking at it as like, "Oh my God, woe is me. I'm never gonna get out of here." I looked at it as, "Okay, hang on a second. Hang on a second. If I can overcome this, if I can find some power in this, some way to get through this, that right there will be the fuel for the rest of my life." And so I found great strength in suffering.

Grace strengthened it because while I threw all of that, it started to callous my mind over the victim's mentality. This whole thing about suffering, yeah, it sucks really bad, really, really bad. But we all live on this side of suffering, on this side, this nice box that's very comfortable that we know when everything is going to happen. We're in it. It's good. We know how everything's going to turn out.

It's those few people who are willing to go on this side of suffering. And once they get through that, ask him how he feels now, his mind, how far he grew. In that short period of time, he grew so much more than the normal person because he was willing to go outside himself. Because on the other end of suffering is greatness. It's not over here. So a whole bunch of us, we put ourselves in this great box.

And in that box, there's no suffering in it. So what we do is we, is we, is we show to ourselves from greatness. So for me, for instance, I was 300 damn pounds at one time in my life. Spray for cockroaches, made a thousand dollars a month. I was living in that box.

I would sometimes look over the box and I saw hell, suffering, storms, avalanches, tornadoes. I don't want to go over there. But I knew if I can get through that. Mentally, on the other side was a 185-pound person who was a Navy SEAL, went through ranger school. Only person to do this. Only person to do that. Only person to do this. But I have to do all of that. All that I have to go through. So you peek over the box and you go back in and say, oh, I'm okay being 300 pounds making $1,000 a month. I'm okay over here.

And on the other side is where you start to really start your journey. People think they start their journey because they're born. No, there's a lot of people in graves who have lived a hundred years and have never started their real journey. Your real journey starts when you go outside that box and you start climbing mountains. You start climbing mountains and you think you're at the top of the mountain. You go down the other side of it, think I'm here. You look up, there's another f***ing mountain.

And it goes on and it goes on and it goes on. And just when you're getting ready to quit, you crest that final mountain, you get down and you look and there you are. And it starts to make sense to you then. It's so easy to get lost in the fog of life. Tragedy hunts us all. And any event that causes suffering will linger longer than it should if you let it.

Because our sad stories enable us to grade ourselves on a forgiving curve. They give us latitude and justification to stay lazy, weak-minded motherf***ers. And the longer it takes for us to process that pain, the harder it is to reclaim our lives. Sometimes weakness and laziness are rooted in hate and anger. And until we receive the confession, apology, or compensation we believe we are owed,

We stay stuck in our shit as a form of self, righteous rebellion against our tormentors or even against life itself. Some of us become entitled. We think our pain entitles us to feel sorry for ourselves or that we are entitled to good fortune because we survived hell. Of course, feeling entitled doesn't make it so. Understand, the clock is always ticking and at some point your golden hour will expire unless you take action. People who get lost in their past,

The ones who bore their friends and family with the same tragic story over and over without showing a hint of progress remind me of a skydiver who becomes too fixated on their tangled parachute. They know they have a backup ready to go but burn so much time trying to fix the primary chute that they forget to track their altimeter.

and by the time they cut the first chute away and pull the second ripcord, it's too late. Part of the problem is that they have become terrified of pulling that second cord because if it's also f***ed up, then they truly will be helpless. That is a mental trap set by fear. We cannot afford to remain afraid of cutting away dead weight to save ourselves.

I was that skydiver for far too long. My father was violent. My mom was broken. I was bullied, laughed at, and misunderstood. Check, check, and checkmate. And yet, I was breathing free, and I was not bleeding. Physically, I was alive and well, and perfectly capable of cutting all of that bullshit away. I'd wasted way too much of my life telling myself the same sad story.

I needed to move forward. It was time to write something new. If an act of God or nature tore your life apart, the good news is that you really have nobody to blame. Yet, the randomness of it all can feel so personal as if you've been marked for doom by the fates. If you feel wronged by somebody else, you may be waiting on a confession or an apology in order to move forward. But I'm sorry to say the apology.

That tearful confession you've been dreaming of will never come. The good news is you don't need anybody else to free you from your trauma. You can do it on your own. My father never apologized to me. Nobody ever said sorry for anything I went through. I had to come to the conclusion that while I didn't deserve any of it, I was my main problem and primary obstacle. I'd given Tronis Goggins all my power.

I had to take it back. I had to defuse my demon. I had to shrink him down to the lowly, pathetic figure he was by, humanizing him. Just as there was no other way to come out of the gauntlet that was my childhood except f***ed up, I had to see that he was a mortally f***ed up piece of s*** because of what he went through. Once I understood that, it was up to me

to either do the hard work to break that cycle or stay cursed. Like medics on the scene of a car accident, we all must act with a sense of urgency and tune into that ticking clock in the back of our minds. Because there is a drop dead time on everything we do in life. All our dreams and visions come with expiration dates etched in invisible ink. Windows of opportunity can and do close. So it is imperative that we do not waste time on bullsh**.

None of us have any clue what's coming for us or when our time might run out, which is why I do my best to ignore anything that is counterproductive. I'm not suggesting we act like robots, but we need to understand that forward motion gives our lives momentum. We need to remember that sometimes chaos will descend and a clear highway can be wiped out by a flash flood in the blink of an eye. When that happens,

A lot of motherfuckers look for a cozy place to hunker down and hide out until the storm passes. I'm only human, they say. When holy hell rains down upon them and they feel drained and powerless, they cannot conceive of a way to keep going. I understand that impulse, but if I had succumbed to the I'm only human mentality, I never would have dug myself out of the deep hole I was in at 24 years old.

Because the second you utter those words, the white towel is fluttering in the air and your mind stops looking for more fuel. I didn't know for sure if I'd ever find my way out of the darkness. I just knew that I could not throw in the towel and neither can you. Because there is no towel in our corner. There is only water and a cut man. And if those are your only options, you have no choice but to keep fighting until you overcome every last thing that once held you back.

You have been preoccupied by bull for way too long. It's time to switch your focus to the things that will slingshot you forward. For some reason, God put me in almost every situation on the planet Earth. So when I talk to people, it's not sugarcoated because I'm not saying it from I'm always a hundred and seventy five pounds my whole life. I don't say much to those people. Maybe you're a piece of shit. Maybe you're you want to be nobody.

Maybe you're happy exactly where you are in life because obviously you are. Maybe you don't have the determination to be somebody better than who you are. And if you want to live with that, I'll support you in that. If you're good with being who you are, that every day you wake up and every day you smell like shit because you can't wash your body well and your skin's messed up because your health's so bad and you can't put your clothes on right, you need help with that. You need help like when I was doing, I need help wiping my ass. That makes you feel good? Nothing I can say to you.

If every day you wake up with this, see, people are haunted, but they obviously like horror films because they keep watching the same movie. I don't like horror films. A lot of people like horror films. So I don't say much to them. I say exactly what I said to you right there, because I was once you. I didn't like horror films, so I changed it. Some people are just they become like you said, it gets real small when you're lazy and you're fat.

Your will, their will is so small that they don't have any and you can't give it to them. There has to be something. This is what I'm talking about now because this isn't a hack. This has to be in you. Something in you has to wake up. And usually the only person that can wake it up is you. Sometimes you can read a David Goggins book because I was all this and then a lot more of up.

But if you don't have a little flame, you know, just that just barely you're done. I can't I can't light it for you. You have to explore, examine the insides of yourself. And what do you really want out of life? When I first got into endurance events, I loved the breakdown phase because the suffering made me feel alive and reminded me that I'd gone all out this time.

I didn't relish it in the same way, but I knew that breakdown was a byproduct of an all-out effort and that if I explore the crevices of my mind, I would find valuable lessons which tend to spill out with any unraveling. Most people prefer to avoid breakdowns like this because the suffering can be so overwhelming, it just might mark you forever. I embrace breakdown and welcome the scarring.

There is a hell of a lot of information in scar tissue. Scars are proof that the past is real. Physical scars never go away. And when you look at them, they can bring you right back to a specific place in time. But the scar tissue that builds up around that old injury is weak. Professional fighters who've been hit in the face thousands of times bleed faster than those who have never been punched.

Once you've been cut deep, you are forever vulnerable to bleeding. The same is true for the mental and emotional scars that we all carry with us. Scars we cannot see. They might be invisible, but they affect us much more severely than physical scars. Mental

and emotional scars are our weak spots and they can open up just as easily as physical scars unless we do the work to strengthen them. If you haven't dealt with your scars they can alter your life's path. You will be prone to failure during difficult physical and emotional situations whether that's during an athletic event, at work, or in your home life and eventually you will land back in front of your mirror that never lies.

Breakdown is its own kind of mirror. Whatever you're made of is laid out in front of you clear and plain. Your history and mindset become a weathered old map ridged with your scars. And if you read them like an archaeologist on a dig, you might uncover the code you need to rise again and become better and stronger.

Because there is no transformation without breakdown and there is always another evolution, another skin to shed, a better or deeper version of ourselves waiting to be revealed.

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