Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within

by David Goggins

Life is the mountain we are all climbing, but hope is not an anchor point. It’s too soft, fluffy, and fleeting. There’s no substance behind hope. It’s not a muscle you can develop, and it’s not rooted down deep. It’s an emotion that comes and goes.

But once exhaustion sets in, doubt and insecurity tend to penetrate and dissipate that flimsy brand of belief. Then there’s the belief born in resilience. It comes from working your way through layers of pain, fatigue, and reason, and ignoring the ever-present temptation to quit until you strike a source of fuel you didn’t even know existed.

It’s not an emotion to be shared or an intellectual concept, and nobody else can give it to you. It must bubble up from within.

I’m haunted by my future goals, not my past failures. I’m haunted by what I may still become. I’m haunted by my own continued thirst for evolution.

It’s about constant effort, learning, and adaptation, which demands unwavering discipline and belief.

Roger that. It ain’t your fucking fault that you were dealt a bad hand, but…it is your responsibility. How long will you allow your past to hold you back before you finally take control of your future?

Fuck it. I was always destined to be that one warrior. Content to be the motherfucker who sharpens his sword alone.

Denial is self-protecting, but it’s also self-limiting. Accepting your full truth, including all your faults, imperfections, and missteps, allows you to evolve, expand your possibilities, seek redemption, and explore your true potential. And until you unpack your baggage, it will be impossible to know what your potential really is. The whole truth can’t haunt you if it serves you.

You cannot be afraid to disappoint people. You have to live the life you want to live. Sometimes, that means being the motherfucker who can put a middle finger up to everyone in the room and be totally comfortable with that.

That is a winner’s mentality. Winners in life see everything they experience and everything they hear, see, and feel as pure energy. They train their minds to find it. They drop into the gnarly crevices to mine golden nuggets of trauma, doubt, and hate. They do not live disposable, single-use lives. They discard nothing and refurbish everything. They find strength in the bullying and heartbreak, in their defeats and failures. They harvest it from the people who hate them personally and from the online trolls too.

If you stop grabbing iron with your bare hands, they will lose their callouses. Your mind works the same way. You have to fight to keep that mindset of getting up every day to get after it because it wants to go away.

Many dreams die while suffering. Think about it. We conjure our biggest dreams, our most audacious goals, when we feel safe and warm. Even if you’re struggling financially, emotionally, spiritually, or physically, your grand plan to defy the odds probably came to you in a moment of comfort, when you had time to evaluate where you are and how you got there.

Once you step into that shower, you get so warm within a minute that you forget what being cold even felt like, and then, you realize that your warmth just cost you a piece of your soul, if not the whole damn thing, which can lead to a lifetime of regret.

But you must remember that those images of home aren’t actually rooted in love. They are a product of your fear, disguised as love.

Everything in life comes down to how we handle those crucial seconds. When psychological, physical, or emotional pressure redlines, your adrenal glands go haywire, and you are no longer in control. What separates a true savage from everybody else is the ability to regain control of their mind in that split second, despite the fact that all is still fucked!

Moments of doubt are unavoidable when we take on any strenuous task. I’ve used the One-Second Decision to regain my composure and win hundreds of small battles during ultra races, on the pull-up bar, and in stressful work situations. And the first step is to mentally take a knee.

Never quit when your pain and insecurity are at their peak. If you must retreat, quit when it’s easy, not when it’s hard. Control your thought process and get through the most difficult test first. That way, if you do bow out, you’ll know it wasn’t a reaction based on panic. Instead, you’ve made a conscious decision based on reason and had time to devise your plan B.

Respect is earned every day by waking up early, challenging yourself with new dreams or digging up old nightmares, and embracing the suck like you have nothing and have never done a damn thing in your life.

When all you want is for the incline to stop kicking your ass, it tricks you into thinking you’ve made it, only to reveal that you aren’t even close! But you don’t have to be a trail rat to know that feeling. In life, there are plenty of false summits.

We have to learn to stop looking for a sign that the hard time will end. When the distance is unknown, it is even more critical that you stay locked in so the unknown factor doesn’t steal your focus. The end will come when it comes, and anticipation will only distract you from completing the task in front of you to the best of your ability. Remember, the struggle is the whole journey. That’s why you’re out there. It’s why you signed up for this race, or that class, or took the damn job. There is great beauty when you are involved in something that is so hard most people want it to end.

There are no days off, and there is no downtime when you are obsessed with being great. That is what it takes to be the baddest motherfucker ever at what you do.

Discipline builds mental endurance because when effort is your main priority, you stop looking for everything to be enjoyable.

People who feel sorry for themselves are obsessed with their own problems and their own fate. Is that really much different than the greedy and egotistical people who want to feel better than everybody else?

Because, when you are humble enough to remember that you’ll never know it all, each lesson you learn only makes you hungrier to learn more, and that will put you on a path that guarantees you will grow all the way to the grave.

Your mind will compile reasons why that distance is beyond you, and you may believe them.

Each time you level up, your mind will step in like an overbearing chaperone and try to shut down the party.

Whenever I’ve been challenged, whenever I’ve been forced to scrap for additional resources to stay afloat, there has always been more. That’s why I ride that line: because those dark moments are rare, raw, and beautiful.

While most people stop when they’re tired, I stop when I am done. In a world where mediocrity is often the standard, my life’s mission is to become uncommon amongst the uncommon.

We all owe it to ourselves to stand for something. Principles give us a foundation—solid ground we can trust and build on as we continue to redefine what’s possible in our own lives. Sure, some will be put off by your dedication and level of effort. Others will call you obsessed or think that you’ve gone crazy. When they do, smile and say, “I’m not crazy. I’m just not you.”

But every statistician will warn you that whenever you deal in probabilities, there will be outliers. Always!

There’s got to be someone who demonstrates greatness and makes everyone around them think differently. Why not you? The road to success is rarely a straight line.

I never needed to be the hardest motherfucker in the world. That became a goal because I knew it would bring out my best self. Which is what this fucked-up world needs from all of us: to evolve into the very best versions of ourselves. That’s a moving target, and it isn’t a one-time task. It is a lifelong quest for more knowledge, more courage, more humility, and more belief. Because when you summon the strength and discipline to live like that, the only thing limiting your horizons is you.