David Goggins – WAKE UP AND GET AFTER IT | Success Starts in the Morning
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Learn more at phrma.org slash IPWorksWonders. Every day, thousands of Comcast engineers and technologists like Kunle put people at the heart of everything they create. In the average household, there are dozens of connected devices. Here in the Comcast family, we're building an integrated in-home Wi-Fi solution for millions of families like my own.

It brings people together in meaningful ways. Kunle and his team are building a Wi-Fi experience that connects one billion devices every year. Learn more about how Comcast is redefining the future of connectivity at ComcastCorporation.com slash Wi-Fi. 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 mother...

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 sh*t 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've 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 of 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 bullshit. 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 bullshit for way too long.

It's time to switch your focus to the things that will slingshot you forward. Mediocrity is everywhere right now. And we're always trying to find an easy way out. And we're judging ourselves. Let's say there's 10 people in this room and we're all mediocre. But I'm the best of the mediocre people. I now think I'm great.

I'm great. We surround ourselves around people that make us feel great. They tell us what we want to hear. The second we put ourselves amongst the uncommon people, we don't like that feeling, that challenge and feel that of that person who's waking up at three 30 in the morning and say, Hey, push your s*** off. We're going for a run. We don't like that challenge. We like that person who says, Hey, you know what, man? I don't feel good today, man. And they say, Oh, it's okay, brother.

We'll take a day off, maybe get a pizza and watch the game. We like that. We love that feeling. Why? Because you understand, man, we're good, bro. We don't want that like this. Hey, man, no, bro. Get your on, man. Stop being a punk. We don't want that in our lives. We don't want that person who's constantly challenging our weaknesses. We want that person who's constantly making us feel nice and good and secure in us. That's the mediocrity of life. We want to be the best amongst the average people.

People wonder, how do you stay hungry all the time? Because after I accomplish something, I don't sit back like a lot of guys who graduate Buzz, graduate this, graduate that. They get comfortable. They wonder why I'm getting weak, man. I don't know. I lost my edge. What's going on? Because once you hit the top of the mountain, guess what happened?

I'm good. I'm good. So you wonder why you're falling down now because once we top of the mountain you got another one That's mediocrity. There's a lot of people in mediocrity who have a nice resume, but they're one-timers man They hit they hit a one-time deal. They busted it open got a lot of money, but they're good You're mediocre now, man. What are you doing today? Tomorrow the next day. That's what I'm listening to theorists. I

I don't listen to all that bulls**t. I listen to who's like this man. What's wrong man? I'm tired dude. Why are you tired? Because tomorrow I get to do the f**king s**t again man. Whatever the s**t is that made me nauseous and sick to my stomach. It made me hurt. There's no ending. And that's the person I listen to. That's the person who's gained knowledge. You gain knowledge through suffering. And on the other end of suffering is a world that very few

Very few have ever seen. It's a beautiful world because that's where you find yourself. You don't find yourself in over here. You find yourself on the other end, like the 100 mile race I was on. I ran it for 24 hours. I found myself on the other end of that race. That 19 hours, I found, wow, there's a whole nother world out here that I've never even saw. But the world is in your mind.

And that's what all that mediocrity is about. Mediocrity is contagious. Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly or it vanishes. Just like knowledge,

You can't take self-discipline for granted. Unfortunately, being a self-disciplined person isn't a one and done kind of thing. Once you have learned how to live that way, you can still lose it if you don't consistently strengthen it by setting new challenges and rejecting instant gratification in favor of bigger future rewards.

Never assume that you're disciplined enough. There's always a new area in which you can improve your self-control and further expand your comfort zone. For example...

Regular exercise poses no challenge for my self-discipline. In order to strengthen it, I need to set bigger and bigger exercise-related challenges for myself. Instead of focusing on fitness, I can also find a new area in which my discipline is lacking, such as developing more patience when dealing with other people and focus on improving it until it's no longer a test for my resolve.

Such consistent practice ensures that you're at least maintaining your level of self-control and ideally always getting better at it. Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself.

and be lenient to everybody else. The only standards that should concern you are your own standards. If you act in accordance with the standards of the majority of people, you'll be overweight, unfit, unhealthy, lazy, hating your job, not having enough time for your family, and in debt. I sometimes get flack for my goals. You're already slim. Why do you still watch your diet? Why do you save so much money?

You should live it up. Can't you live like a normal person? Instead of waking up at 5 a.m. and going to sleep as early as 8 p.m. By the standards of the person criticizing me, I should have stopped improving myself a long time ago. According to my standards, the growth should never end. I always hold myself responsible for a higher standard, and this allows me to maintain success

friendly habits in my life and achieve even more success? If you allow yourself to have low standards, how are you supposed to ever achieve excellence? Exhibiting self-control is one of the most powerful demonstrations of having high standards. Letting fleeting emotions and urges control your life, as most people do, is a surefire path to mediocrity. The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part

The important thing in life is not triumph, but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well. Nobody will ever give you any grades for your level of self-discipline. There's no finish line and there's no podium for the winners. The only purpose of building self-discipline is to conquer yourself, your own urges, your own weaknesses, and your own self-sabotaging behaviors.

It's easy to forget this fact and assume that when you reach your goals, you're done. In fact, the moment you make your dreams come true isn't the most important moment. It's important, no doubt, but without the process leading to it. In itself, it means little. The most important moments are the moments of struggle, when you're striving to fight even when you can barely stand and the whole world is spinning around you.

It's this very act that proves your mettle and showers you with life-encompassing benefits, not the act of winning in itself. Whenever you find yourself frustrated that you're still a long way from the finish line, remember that it's right now, at this very moment, that you're collecting the biggest rewards. It's the struggle in itself that improves you

Makes you a more successful person. That's why I talk about the warrior mentality And that's why so many people are lost when I start talking you have the right You're lucky that you don't have to think like warriors think you're very privileged I chose this world to be a warrior now and I would choose it again if I came back to this world but the mentality of a warrior is very different than normal mentality and

You must be that person on that door, get ready to open it, thinking to yourself, "If I die, so be it." The only way you can go in that door is knowing there's a great chance you're gonna die. It's like being a SEAL, you train with live ammo. You jump on an airplane, everything you do, you could die. So to be a warrior, why people don't understand me, I'm glad you don't understand me. Merry Christmas, good on you. Because being a warrior takes a whole different mindset.

a whole different mindset to know that there's a great chance I may not be in the North. Like I was in for 21 years. I'm lucky. I'm very lucky that I'm alive, able to talk to you, able to still run. But when you sign up on that dotted line to be like a SEAL, your mentality changes. I may not live. You got to accept that. And that's the mentality you have.

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