Why anyone wanting more out of themselves — which should be all of us — should give Goggins a read

I get it.

Most people, for them, David Goggins is that wild-eyed, shirtless dude yelling “You don’t know me, son,” into the camera while banging out reps on the bench.

Or dropping swears, still yelling into the camera, about why he’s running 20 miles in the desert on just a random day — because you won’t.

A lot of people look past Goggins because he’s a lot. And I get it. I’m a mild-mannered newsman/dad. I only take off my shirt for showers.

But if the only messages you take away from David Goggins are the extreme ones — like if your leg bones start to crack you can wrap them in tape so you can run to the end of Navy SEALs training — you’re missing some really useful, meaningful stuff.

He’s not just that guy. 

If your goals are a bit too ambitious, if they’re a bit too high, or if you’re starting too far down the mountain, he’s your sherpa.

And if you think you’ve been to the deepest, darkest depths, he’s the Jacques Cousteau who has documentation of things even deeper and darker.

He is the Lewis and Clark of the untamed West of our minds, and he’s brought back maps of how to get deeper into the wilds than anyone before, and how to get back.

After growing up struggling to read; suffering beatings at the hands of his father, having to witness the same happen to his brother and mother; growing up near an active chapter of the Klan and suffering the daily racism that comes along with that; he found himself a grown man, 300 pounds spraying for cockroaches and not happy with any of it.

And apparently, he didn’t know anything about setting goals, because he decided his next step would be to be a Navy SEAL, one of the most demanding, challenging and selective fighting forces in the American military. To have any hope of achieving that goal, not only would he have to lose 100 pounds and catch up a life’s worth of fitness just to qualify for the training and selection process, but he was also still miles away on the academic side.

The simple unembellished details of his life and how he met those goals — and so many more — are inspiring, but honestly what I find so much more valuable are the mental devices he’s created, the perspectives and psychological hacks he’s created to enable him to achieve more than anyone thought that kid from Brazil, Ind., or an overweight, unfulfilled exterminator ever would. And his ability to lay them out. 

The edge

One of the writers I idolized in my college years was Hunter S. Thompson who said this: “The edge … There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

That’s Goggins. He’s the Mars rover. He’s a scout on the dark side of the moon, sending back images of things we’d never see without him.

He is willing to push his body till it breaks. Because he wants to be uncommon amongst the uncommon, he’s willing to push farther than the rest of us, and because he’s figured out how to push himself over the edge, he’s reporting back on what we can do to push closer to that edge. 

What do I mean by that? 

I’m thinking of Goggins-isms. Neatly packaged bundles of thoughts that you can unravel when things get hard, or have ready for that eventuality.

Like, the idea of callusing the mind. Not that long ago he held the pull-up record, a feat that required him to destroy his hands and let them callous over. Much the same, to accomplish goals like running the 135-mile Badwater ultra-marathon through Death Valley, he had to callous over his mind.  

That the mind is a governor, he said. Like the device in cars that caps their top speeds, your mind will tell you you’re not capable of things to try to protect you. Having pushed past what his mind said he couldn’t do, having mastered his mind, as he puts it, he knows it’s a lie. And not just in his mind, but your mind.

There is so much in what Goggins is putting out that can help all of us achieve more, not just in running, or pull-ups, but in any goal that means something to us. For me, that’s writing a novel. Putting together something good enough to sell, and for people to read and love and come away thinking differently about themselves in the world around them.

You can’t do that through normal effort, especially not with a family, a demanding career and a long list of other goals. That takes pushing past the governor. And some of these devices — even more than black coffee and Red Bull — can help us do that. 

In the next few posts I hope to unpack and delve deeper into some of my favorite Goggins-isms from his newest book “Never Finished,” — like the moldy cookies in the cookie jar, the personal oath and the one-second decision — In hopes of maybe making them even more relatable and usable.

Because, you see, I’m not a shirtless Navy SEAL running through the desert. I’m just an average dad with a good life that knows that he wants more, knows he’s going to have to work harder to get it and is building on Goggins’ work and research to do just that. Because this work is for anybody looking to get more out of themselves, which should be all of us.