David Goggins: How to Build Immense Inner Strength

That's why there's a lot of average, and it makes me so fucking mad. Every day I walk this Earth, and I see average all over the fucking place. And they want to ask me, how did you do it? I can't tell you, 'cause you're not going to fucking do it. You're not gonna do it.

The barbaric life that I live, that you have to live, the almost obsession that you must have to be great, you can't put that shit in a fucking book, bro. You can't put it in a book. You can't write about it. It has to be experienced.

There's no fucking passion. No fucking motivation ... It's every day of your life, just doing. No passion, no discipline, no motivation. All these words... So many people fucking use these words. It's water.

Human beings need to hear this. They need to stop hearing these hacks on this and that. There's no fucking hack, bro. There's no fucking hack. Yeah, you may this and that and saunas and all shit ... There is no fucking life hack ... Do it and do it and do it. That's the hack.

Don't be mad when you're laying there in your fucking bed, and you're in the fucking hospital; you're 70, 80, 90-years-old. You're thinking, man, why didn't I fucking do something. Because you didn't do it. You didn't do shit. You may live a great life, man, but you always felt empty inside. I don't feel empty ... There's not one empty bone in my fucking body.

...They were like, you got to go on social media. And I was like, fuck you, man. It's poison...

If you don't have a little flame... you're done. I can't light it for you. And that's the harsh reality of this life ... You have to examine the insides of yourself ... A lot of people out here just don't fucking want it.

I didn't teach myself victory first. I taught myself failure. I taught myself how to fail.

The most frustrating thing in the world for me is when normal people judge a man like myself on what it really takes to extract greatness from nothing. It takes every bit of who you are, if you choose that route.

This is why I say 'stay hard,' because when you weren't given the gifts, the only thing you can do in life is stay hard ... This is all you can do. There's no magic pill or a magic potion. All you can do is outwork the man that God created, or woman, in you.

Why most people don't want to do that, build that willpower, is because it is scary. It unlocks a whole bunch of things about who you are and who you're not. And a lot of people don't want to go down that journey to discover who they are and who they're not—because it's not a pretty journey.

We all have this ability to have her own medicine cabinet. But unless you go in there and put the medicine in there, it's always going to be fucking empty. You're always gonna need pre-workout. I don't drink coffee. I don't need none of that. I can run for 70 hours, and I have before, no caffeine.

Whether you believe in God or not, I do, he put this lab rat, which is me, on this planet and said, 'Let me fucking see with a beat-up, abused kid who can barely learn... who has a twisted body, messed up genetics, sickle cell, this and that, let me give him everything that pretty much disqualifies you from the military... and let's put him in this and see what comes out of it.

Once you figure out your brain, you become unstoppable to almost anything ... You're a fucking beast, a beast. But most, again, you just can't read about it. You can't sit back and be a theorist. You have to be a fucking practitioner.

I'm an artist, and every day I'm painting Mona Lisa. Every day. But it's a different one. It's not the same painting .... You need to create, and you can't create with phones and everything going around you, so you got to block yourself off.

I don't feel bad for people who have ADHD, who have learning disabilities ... People don't want to go through the process of focus—of teaching yourself how to truly focus.

It's funny, human beings want to show you the best side, and they want to hide the worst side. For me, I'm going to teach you how to be vulnerable. That's the only way you fix yourself. You don't fix yourself by coming out here and me selling you some fucking books.

That's why you'll never hear me say I'm missing something. I found it years ago. You find it in the suck... to the point where you know exactly who you are. Most people are missing something because they don't know who they are. They never examine themselves.

There's no hacks, bro. It's you against you. You against you.

What I do is I make sure that my family has everything they need. Everything they need ... I give them everything they need so they can leave me the fuck alone. I make sure you're happy as fuck, 'cus I got to go to work.

I'm not a real smart guy. And what I mean by that is I was born ADD, ADHD. My brain cannot retain information ... So when you ask me this question about what does studying look like for me, I have to go over the same page over and over and over and over.

I am literally, I was the lowest form on Earth. No talent, no ability to learn, and I literally know what it is to be rock bottom and to build that up. So that question about learning, it's a pain in my ass.

No one can motivate me. I have a resume full of fucking motivation.