Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins

A memoir and how-to-guide on physical and mental toughness

This book could be aptly renamed: Refuse to Quit. Though not explicitly a motivational book, it inspires courage to start as well as determination and obsession to see the effects of compounding in its readers.

Stories of great men drive the world forward. While not a son of Zeus, David Goggins is the modern-day Hercules. Despite facing childhood abuse, poverty, and a lack of education, he defied the odds to avoid becoming another unfortunate statistic. Goggins embodies the spirit of breaking free from a victim mentality and seizing one’s destiny—carpe diem. In his own raw terms, he grabbed life by the balls. There’s no cheat code or easy way out. While mental hacks and models exist to push past limits and streamline thought processes, Goggins dismissed efficiency. He simply did it. His lack of proper mentorship amplified his struggles but also forged a resilience and introspection crucial for his future success.

I read this book during my time training Muay Thai. It was necessary and perfect for the moment. There’s a limited space for self-help books in the Lindy library, but Can’t Hurt Me definitely belongs there.

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• Take their souls by conquering other people’s minds

  • Leapfrog others’ expectations of you, shocking them, so they are at a loss how to dominate you

• Think about others, and lead from the front

  • The more you think about yourself when you’re going through hell, the harder hell is going to be. The second you start thinking about everyone else, you’re no longer thinking about yourself. You’re not trapped in your own thoughts. You’re not trapped in yourself.

• If you want to get true mental toughness, you have to triple down on your weaknesses. That’s the only way you’ll callous over a victim’s mentality

  • We’re commonly taught to focus on our strengths. But what if the bottleneck (in life) isn’t our strength, but our mental toughness? 

  • Triple down on your strengths is about making people experts. Callusing the mind is making someone an unbreakable human being.

• When you know you’re not going to quit, the brain starts to say, “OK I guess we’ve got to find more.”

  • If your brain is in control and you are in control of your brain, you will find more.

    • You are in control of the dialogue in your mind.

  • In his ultramarathon, Goggins is at mile 70. He has diarrhea. He’s peeing a bit of blood. He’s thinking: how can I do this? Everything started slowing down because he knew he wasn’t going to quit.

• Cookie Jar Method: remind yourself of the tough and painful things you’ve overcome. Each time things go south, pull out a cookie and get reinspired.

  • Cookies are times you overcame odds and tasted success. Write down life obstacles, not just achievements. Take inventory of the small tasks you succeeded in finishing and remind yourself of what it felt like to overcome those obstacles

  • When you encounter yourself going through a downhill in life you can (1) attempt to hide your emotions by “feeling good” when you are not, (2) let your emotions drag you down and cope, (3) Not accept the state you are in — dive headfirst toward the struggle.

• Adding new cookies:

  • Set ambitious goals before your next run or workout, and let your journey of overcoming the obstacles become new cookies.

    • Maintain a maximum heart rate for a minute, then two minutes.

    • Challenge yourself to do more pushups, pullups, planks in one workout.

    • Study harder or longer than ever before

    • Read a record number of books

• A software update to shut our Governor down and the 40% rule 

  • Our body and mind are only allowing us to tap into 40% of our potential and by removing the governor, it could be way higher without damaging the engine

  • You’ll have to chase pain like it’s your damn job. Your tolerance for mental and physical suffering will expand because your software will update.

    • On day 1 of being a boxer, taking 1 punch will feel like hell. At year 10, you won’t be stopped by 1 punch, you’ll be able to fight 12 rounds and come back the next day.

  • Do it gradually

    • When you train, push-ups do 2 more than the day before

    • When you go running, run an extra 10 minutes. In the pain and effort, it causes to that extra step lies your growth and removal of the governor

  • If you stay with any task that is trying to beat you down, you will reap rewards.

    • If you continue running on a broken pinky toe, you’ll be able to run on broken legs pretty soon.

• It’s easy to be open-minded when you’re taking yoga class and taking a stroll by the beach, but when you’re suffering, keeping an open-mind is hard work

  • It’s hard to maintain discipline to reenter yourself after every small failure. Do not let it compound. If you brick the first 50 questions on a 100 question test, how do you find the strength to not let go on the 51st question

• The easy fix is not the one that gets you a calloused mind.

  • Become obsessed with hard work. Passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful if you have the work ethic to back them up.

  • Work ethic #1. Everything else is 2nd.

  • The 40 hour work week means 40% effort. Don’t be satisfied for mediocrity

• He could easily maintain the status quo and enjoy the sweet fruits of his labors, but instead he find a way to stay hard, because his labors are his sweetest fruits

  • Each hour of his week is dedicated to a particular task, and when that hour shows up, he dedicates 100% of his effort to that task. That is the only way to minimize wasted hours.

  • Earn your place, everyday.

• “Tabulate time like you do your taxes. When you find yourself ensnared in frivolous conversations or activities that don’t benefit you in any way, move the f*ck on”

  • If you have goals, it’s OK to be unforgiving

• Analyze your schedule. Kill your empty habits. Burn out the bullshit. And see what’s left.

  • How much time do you spend:

    • At the dinner table talking about nothing after the meal is done?

    • How many calls and texts do you send for no reason at all?

  • See the activities in your life and put a timestamp on them. How many hours are required to eat and shop and clean. What’s your commute like? Block everything into windows of time and once your day is scheduled out, you’ll know how flexible you have and how much time you have to do __ on a given day? 

    • List your prioritized tasks every hour of the day. If one task bleeds into overtime, make sure you know it 

• Schedule one full rest day per week

  • Resting deeply and well is a hard habit.

  • Turn your phone off, keep the computer shut down. Hang with friends or family and eat or drink well to recharge and get back to it. It’s a 24 hour mission to keep up a championship place

  • You have to find a way to get it in. You’re your own accountability coach.

• Running. Studying. Habits. It’s like breathing air

  • The more you do, and the more you do, and the more you rewire your brain – at first this sucks it’s horrible. Pretty soon, it’s “roger that.”

• Chaos can and will descend without warning and WHEN, not IF, there is nothing you can do to stop it. It will multiply and compound.  

  • It’s on you to adjust and stay after it. Refocus your activities and get back to it

  • If you can’t run, then get into yoga or deep breathing. 

  • If you can’t dribble with your right, become a master with your left.

• Whenever you recognize the sensation of “feeling sorry for yourself,” know it’s victims mentality, and then immediately move on to continue doing the honest, necessary work needed to make you better

• Goggins became part of the team, but he didn’t change his personality to become part of the brotherhood

• Goggins made 7 requests to join the army ranger school before he got it. 7!!

  • Keep persisting

• Look around for platforms to be uncommon against uncommon men. When others buckle for survival, stand apart and lead by example . Relish those moments

  • Bravo Platoon in winter storm weather emergency mode. 

  • It’s usually the people who are all by themselves. The guy who stays until midnight while everyone’s at the bar. Or the badass who hits the gym after coming off a 48 hour op. Or the wildland firefighter who instead of hitting her bedroll, sharpens her chainsaw after working a fire for 24 hours. 

• A true leader stays exhausted, abhors arrogance, and never looks down on the weakest link

• Being empathetic to the motivated: Asking when and where he/she will go after it again. Never say, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

  • We need to be in tune with the heart, mind, and body of the person we’re around. Empowering words help keep people focused and deadly

  • A lot of us surround ourselves with people who speak to our desire for comfort. People who would rather treat the pain of our wounds and prevent further injury than help us callous over them and try again. We need to surround ourselves with people who will tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear, but at the same time not make us feel we’re up against the impossible.

• Don’t get trapped in this idea that just because you’ve imagined a life for yourself that it will go your way. Your entitled mind is deadweight. Cut it loose.

  • Don’t focus on what you think you deserve. Take aim on what you’re willing to earn. 

• We let so-called experts cap our actual potential. If it’s not bound by the laws of physics, then it’s not a cap.

• Reframe your task from trying to achieve the impossible to achieving the inevitable

  • Remove your doubt by reframing the task as “yours”

    • I decided that the pullup record was already mine. I didn’t know when it would officially become mine. It might be 2 months or 20 years, but once I decided it belonged to me and decoupled it from the calendar, I was filled with confidence and relieved of any pressure. Because my task morphed from trying to achieve the impossible to working towards the inevitable. But to get there, I’d have to find the tactical advantage I’d been missing

• At his lowest point, Goggins found clarity. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t run or operate anymore. His bruised body was his biggest trophy.

  • Enjoy the peace of self-acceptance. Peaceful, but never satisfied without fighting to change things for the better.

• Pain unlocks the secret door in the mind, one that leads to peak performance or beautiful silence. When you push past the self spiraling doubt and panic caused by pain… when all you are is one with that overwhelming sensation, you find new levels to yourself.

• You are not born with will. You develop it by facing your own shadow. Learn to face your shadow, it is the one thing that follows you everywhere. Until we face the truth about ourselves, we will always live at 40% of our true potential

• God has a chart showing what you should have been. If you’re still the guy you were, is that really heaven? I want God to be up there saying ‘I don’t believe it…’

• Always try to know why

  • If you aren’t prepared in advance, if you allow your mind to remain undisciplined in an environment of intense suffering (it won’t feel like it, but it is very much a choice you are making), the only answer you are likely to find is the one that will make it stop as fast as possible. I don’t know”