Can't Hurt Me Summary - David Goggins - Aure's Notes

This story – your story – is full of excuses for why you should not succeed. So, they will fuel your success.

If you suck, tell yourself you suck. That’s ok. You’ll just need to work hard now, in order to lose weight or not suck.

Call yourself out!

Whatever your goal is, you need to be honest about where you are on your path, and what you need to get done.

Whenever he’d cut a workout short because he was tired, he’d go back to the gym to do the entire workout again. He could not be dishonest with himself.

• Write down all the things you don’t like to do or that make you feel uncomfortable.
• Highlight those which are good for you.
• Go do one of them. Then do them again.
• Do something that sucks every day.
• Once it becomes comfortable, go further.
• The more you make yourself feel uncomfortable, the stronger you will become.

He learned that everything in life is a mind game. No matter how bad something is, the pain eventually stops.

Taking Souls is a game you play with your own mind by forcing yourself to overperform so that your enemy is surprised – your enemy has “his soul taken”.

During the SEAL training, he learned that all pain is finite. Smile at it. It will end eventually. Victory is about bringing your best when you feel your worst – and not quitting.

The only way to turntables and earn respect in competitions is to show excellence.

And the only way to be excellent is to work harder.

Achieve what your opponent/superior could never do themselves.

The calloused mind enables the brain to tap into the sympathetic nervous system which energizes you.

You should push the hardest when you want to quit the hardest. This is how you train your calloused mind.

• He rejected his past, hence he rejected himself.
• The only way to accept yourself fully is to go back to your past and identify all of the moments of weakness, and label them as just that: weakness.
• Only when you recognize you were weak, can you then accept it and move forward.

Visualize an obstacle, and imagine overcoming it.

• A quarter into the race, he wondered why he was getting himself into these situations.
• At the seventieth mile, he took a break, his body on the verge of collapse.
• To help, he remembered all the pain he went through in his life, tapped into his sympathetic nervous system, and went back running.
• You need all of the hope you can have. David calls his memories of pain and victory, his “Cookie Jar”.

Write down all of the obstacles you have overcome, all of the small and big victories, and the pain you had to go through to succeed.

Fill up your own Cookie Jar.

• Each time he pushed the boundaries, he was surprised to see how far he could go.
• Goggins believes that shortcuts to pain are nonsense.
• The only way to do more and better is to go beyond your perceived limitations.

• The human body is like a stock car. We can go very fast, but there is a governor preventing us from reaching peak potential.
• Our governor is in our mind, and if we remove it, we can achieve anything.
• The only way to remove it is not to listen to the voice telling you to quit.

Your mind is wired to tend towards comfort, not performance.

The way to change that is to callous your mind, meaning, chasing pain!

• When you’re tired, acknowledge that this is your governor of pain talking.
• You are not as tired as you think you are.
• Keeping this in mind will help you keep going.

Another obstacle is friends and family. Often, they drag us down, which is why you should use your Cookie Jar when this happens – it is a great system to remind yourself who you are.

Keeping an open mind will help you keep going. Of course, it’s easier to keep an open mind when you are chilling on your couch than when you’re suffering.

• Remove your governor. To do so, reach a point when you are super tired, and push just 5 or 10% further. Then repeat.
• Life is a mind game.
• The only person you are competing against is yourself.

When students asked him if they could one day run 100 miles like him, this is what Goggins would tell them.

The only way to master your mind and kill the governor is to get addicted to hard work.

This is a three-week challenge during which you will take control of your schedule.

first week,observe your work.

Identify where you wasted time and trim it.

For week two, build a schedule by blocks of 15 minutes.

Do one thing at a time, and focus on it recklessly.

Optimize and refine in week three.

• Every day, he started back to zero.
• This mindset helped him keep on soaking knowledge because it meant that nothing was ever finished. There was always more to do, and further to go. You whether move forward, or backward. But you never stagnate.
• Most people don’t push themselves at all. Among those that do, most stop pushing when they reach their goals. Only the very few never stop pushing.

If you want to become uncommon among uncommon, you will have to stay great – meaning, never rest.

Goggins learned that failures are great, because they contain the data you need to succeed.

• Think about your last/biggest failure. Write everything that went right from your failures, then write about how it affected you.
• Then write about the things you can fix to avoid failing again.
• Then prepare better, and make another attempt.
• If your failure happened 25 years ago, that doesn’t change anything. Write that report.

What if.

When you attempt to do something difficult, a lot of people will discourage you for it.

But what if you could pull it off? What if is the ultimate answer to anyone that had ever doubted you.

After fighting all his life, he had found peace.

He understood that pain had unlocked in his mind a doorway to “a beautiful silence”.