Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within

by David Goggins

This is not a self-help book. Nobody needs another sermon about the ten steps or seven stages or sixteen hours a week that will deliver them from their stalled or fucked-up life. Hit the local bookstore or surf Amazon and you will slip into a bottomless pit of self-help hype. Must feel good to consume because it sure does sell.

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.

There are two levels to belief. There’s the surface level, which our coaches, teachers, therapists, and parents love to preach. “Believe in yourself,” they all say, as if the thought alone can keep us afloat when the odds are against us in the battle of our lives.

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.

It's proof

A lot of folks feel like they are missing something in their lives—something money can’t buy—and that makes them miserable. They attempt to fill the void with material things they can see, feel, and touch. But that empty feeling won’t go away. It fades some until all gets quiet again. Then that familiar gnawing in their gut returns, reminding them that the life they are living is not the fullest expression of who they are or might become.

Unfortunately, most people are not desperate enough to do anything about it. When you’re hogtied in conflicting emotions and other people’s opinions, it’s impossible to tap into belief and easy to drift away from that urge to evolve.

You could be itchy as fuck to experience something different, to be somewhere different, or to become someone different, but when the slightest resistance arises to challenge your resolve, you moonwalk ...

Social media has compounded and spread this virus of dissatisfaction, which is why the world is now populated by damaged people consuming airy gratification, hunting an immediate dopamine fix with no substance at all behind it. Instead of staying focused on growth, millions of minds have been infected with lack, leaving them feeling even lesser than.

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.

After each chapter, you will find an Evolution. In the military, evolutions are drills, exercises, or practices meant to sharpen your skills. In this book, they are hard truths we should all face, and philosophies and strategies you can use to overcome whatever is in your way—and excel in life.

Rise up, motherfuckers. Let’s work!

Reality can be a motherfucker when all of your excuses are stripped away and you are exposed for exactly who and what you have become, but the truth can also be liberating.

That night, I accepted the truth about myself. I finally swallowed reality, and now that I had, my future was undetermined. Anything was possible as long as I adopted a new mindset. I needed to become someone who refused to give in, who simply finds a way no matter what. I needed to become bulletproof, a living example of resilience.

At twenty-four years old, a powerful force was gathering within me, waiting to be unleashed. I would soon call upon it to complete two Hell Weeks, become a member of the Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) Teams, and complete Army Ranger School. I’d compete in ultra races and break the world pull-up record.

Thanks to that one night in Buffalo, New York, when I accepted my fate and became determined to tap into my resilience, I found the will to transform myself into the grittiest motherfucker ever to find light where there was none.

We cannot afford to remain afraid of cutting away dead weight to save ourselves.

I was that skydiver for far too long. My father was violent. My mom was broken. I was bullied, laughed at, and misunderstood. Check, check, and checkmate. And yet, I was breathing free, and I was not bleeding. Physically, I was alive and well and perfectly capable of cutting all of that bullshit away. I’d wasted way too much of my life telling myself the same sad story.

Like medics on the scene of a car accident, we all must act with a sense of urgency and tune into that ticking clock in the back of our minds. Because there is a drop-dead time on everything we do in life. All our dreams and visions come with expiration dates etched in invisible ink. Windows of opportunity can and do close, so it is imperative that we do not waste time on bullshit.

None of us have any clue what’s coming for us or when our time might run out, which is why I do my best to ignore anything that is counterproductive.

When that happens, a lot of motherfuckers look for a cozy place to hunker down and hide out until the storm passes. “I’m only human,”

if I had succumbed to the “I’m only human” mentality, I never would have dug myself out of the deep hole I was in at twenty-four years old. Because the second you utter those words, the white towel is fluttering in the air, and your mind stops looking for more fuel.

You have been preoccupied by bullshit for way too long. It’s time to switch your focus to the things that will slingshot you forward.

For survivors of trauma, denial is a tantalizing numbing agent. It allows you to rewrite your past and sell yourself some fiction. In my brother’s tale, Buffalo was a happy place, and our father was a pillar of the community.

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.

Instead of receiving a big advance, I spent 90 percent of my life savings—more than the advance I would have received—to put out a book of the same quality as anything the major publishers release, and I produced my own audiobook with an entirely new spin.

I gave myself one rule before joining social media: if I can’t live it, I won’t speak it.

Everything must be utilized. Especially the energy in volatile, potentially damaging emotions like fear and hate. You have to learn how to handle them—how to mine them—and once you master that craft, any negative emotion or event that bubbles up in your brain or gets lobbed your way, like a grenade, can be used as fuel to make you better. But to get there, you must literally listen to yourself.

I spoke my fears and my trauma—which not that many people knew about—into that microphone and discovered a strange, unexpected alchemy. My fear and trauma were transformed into energy and confidence.

If you were bullied, abused, or sexually assaulted and are willing to speak the unfiltered truth into the microphone and listen to it over and over, after a period of time, it will become just another story. A powerful story, for sure, but the poison will be neutralized, and the power will be yours.

Many people wake up with dread or doubt day after day. They dread their workouts, their class load, or their job. Maybe they have a test or presentation that makes them nervous, or they know that the day’s workout will hurt. While they linger in bed, they tune into their soft, forgiving self-talk, which doesn’t make it any easier to get up and moving.

Most people rise up eventually, but they remain in a daze for hours because they aren’t fully engaged with their lives. Their self-talk has made them numb to the moment, and they sleepwalk through half the day before they finally perk the fuck up.

grab your phone and record your inner dialogue as soon as you wake up. Don’t hold back. Spill all your dread, laziness, and stress into the mic. Now listen to it. Nine times out of ten, you won’t like what you hear. It will make you cringe. You wouldn’t want your girlfriend or boyfriend, your boss, or your kids to hear your unfiltered weakness. But you should.

Because then you can repurpose it. You can use it to remind yourself that changes must be made. Listening might inspire you to commit to your life in a deeper way, to be your best at work, at school, or in the gym.

Most people in my position don’t read negative comments or emails. They have someone else screen and then erase them. I see hate as just another fuel source. I see the beauty and power in it, and I never let it go to waste. When the negative comments come in, and they always do, I capture them in a screenshot and speak them into my microphone.

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.

The unexpected attention and notoriety that came with and followed the release of Can’t Hurt Me was as humbling as it was disorienting. After decades of grinding in the shadows outside the public eye, I was now spotlit.

I looked at each day as an opportunity to mine the negativity that had colonized my brain and became fascinated by the power of the mind and how it can work for us and against us.

My early years made me very aware of this inherent fragility we all have, but later on, I learned how to harness and channel all my mental horsepower to accomplish things I never thought possible for myself. And I did it by building what I now refer to as my Mental Lab.

In my Lab, each physical workout became a test of my mental fortitude. I stopped caring about how my body looked. You don’t need six-pack abs when your mind is steel-plated. From that point on, each run, every hour on the pull-up bar, and all my late-night study sessions became experiments conducted to see how long my mind would hold out when I continued to apply more and more pressure.

If you don’t feel like you’re good enough, if your life lacks meaning and time feels like it’s slipping through your fingers, there is only one option. Recreate yourself in your own Mental Lab. Somewhere you can be alone with your thoughts and wrestle with the substance of what and who you want to be in your one short life on earth.

We all have a Mental Lab at our disposal, but most people don’t even know that they have access to a place where they can transform themselves. Therefore, they remain locked out. By the time they hit mid-life, the doors are wrapped with a rusty chain and deadbolted.

Mental toughness and resilience fade if they aren’t used consistently. I say it all the time: you are either getting better, or you’re getting worse. You’re not staying the same.

Surgery, sickness, busy work schedules, and family commitments are all great excuses to take a rest today, which makes it that much easier to rest again tomorrow, and that’s a slippery slope!

The way I live and the things I do have always been about the mind. Long before the body goes soft, the mind will have softened. Fortunately, I wasn’t that far gone, but my mind had softened a bit because I hadn’t been challenged to the edge of my capabilities in years.

because when I run, I focus on my stride, remain conscious of where and how my feet strike the ground and on my head and shoulder position. I visualize myself running with a tray of full water glasses on my head. I don’t want any sway or bounce at all. I remain still yet relaxed and let my core and legs carry me forward.

I have never been about the business aspect of this shit anyway, and while I appreciated all the respect and support from the people and organizations I engaged with, I knew it was having a corrosive effect on my mindset.

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.

The best person in any combat scenario is the one who is composed enough to take a knee when the bullets are flying at them. They know they need to evaluate the situation and the landscape to find a way forward and that it’s impossible to make a conscious decision if they or their team is running around like fire ants. Taking a knee in battle is not as easy as it sounds, but it’s the only way to give yourself time to breathe