Can't Hurt Me
- Author: David Goggins
- Rating: 7.5
- TLDR: This book made me start running
Thoughts
You’ll probably notice if I finish these reviews that I have a guilty pleasure. I like self help books. I know, I know, they’re bad, they’re like candy: eat enough of them and you’ll rot your brain. You’ll create neural cavities in the enamel of the mind, and eventually you’ll improperly equate purpose to effort to situation. These books whisper sweet nothings into your ear, tell you you’re special (even when they’re explicitly telling you the opposite), and explain how there’s still time to reassert yourself, reinvent yourself, reprioritize the things that really matter. What they offer is convenient hope. And I don’t necessarily disagree with hope. Afterall, what else do have? Nietzsche killed God in 18821, what is left to believe in?
David Goggins, apparently.
If you don’t know who David Goggins is, look him up. He basically listened the Kelly Clarkson’s Stronger and decided to revolve his personal philsophy around it’s chorus. He pulled himself out of a dead-end job and a dysfunctional family situation and joined the Navy Seals. From there, he continued to embrace discomfort, pain, and the trials of the mind, doing work for the military, running ultramarathons, etc. In short, and forgive my french, he is one hardcore motherfucker.
To clarify, i’m not a ‘bro bro’ type of guy. I don’t do pull ups till my hands bleed, I like my showers warm, and I haven’t woken up at five in the morning since 2012, but after reading his book I definitely relate to David Goggins’ motivation.
Notable Quotations:
You are stopping you!
Whatever your goal, you’ll need to hold yourself accountable for the small steps it will take to get there.
I was a wannabe warrior turned cockroach sniper on the graveyard shift. Just another zombie selling his time on earth, going through the motions.
The longer I watched the more certain I became that there were answers burid in all that suffering.
That’s when I first realized that not all physical and mental limitations are real, and that I had a habit of giving up way too soon.
there would be pain and there would be purpose.
This was war alright, but it wouldn’t be fought on some foreign shore. This one, like most battles we fight in life, would be won or lost in our own minds.
✰ Thematic Statement ✰:
Everything in life is a mind game!
I stopped seeing myself as the victim of bad circumstance, and saw my life as the ultimate training ground instead.
My ability to stay open represented a willingness to fight for my own life
The vast majority of us are slaves to our minds.
you have to do your best work when you are the least motivated.
I knew then that I’d been selling myself short. That there was a whole new level of performance out there to tap into. That the human body can withstand and accomplish a hell of a lot more than most of us think possible, and that it all begins and ends in the mind.
What’s universal is the impulse to succumb. To feel like you’ve given everything you can, and that you are justified in leaving a job undone.
we are only capable of living up to the image we create for ourselves
The only person you are playing against is yourself.
Evaluate your life in its totality! We all waste so much time doing meaningless bullshit.
The point is not to allow a setback to shatter our focus, or our detours to dictate our mindset.
Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb fuck in the classroom again
Luck is a capricious bitch. It won’t always go your way, so you can’t get trapped in this idea that just because you’ve imagined a possibility for yourself that you somehow deserve it. Your entitled mind is dead weight. Cut it loose. Don’t focus on what you think you deserve. Take aim on what you are willing to earn!
but I do know that pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind. One that leads to both peak performance and beautiful silence.
The Buddha famously said that life is suffering. I’m not a Buddhist, but I know what he meant and so do you. To exist in this world, we must contend with humiliation, broken dreams, sadness, and loss. That’s just nature. Each specific life comes with its own personalized portion of pain. It’s coming for you. You can’t stop it. And you know it.
But it’s not the external voices that will break you down. It’s what you tell yourself that matters. The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself. You wake up with them, you walk around with them, you go to bed with them, and eventually you act on them. Whether they be good or bad.
We are all our own worst haters and doubters because self doubt is a natural reaction to any bold attempt to change your life for the better. You can’t stop it from blooming in your brain, but you can neutralize it, and all the other external chatter by asking, What if?.
Footnotes
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Of course, the book the quote is from is titled The Gay Science. I didn’t realize he was an ally. ↩