Can't Hurt Me
Most battles we fight in life would be won or lost in our own minds. The only person you're playing against is yourself.
Although I am not ready to literally repeat all the extreme athletic challenges David Goggins has taken, the key idea I take from this book is that we are capable of more than we think. Our path to success lies in mastering our own minds.
My favorite ideas:
Journaling
Accountability Mirror
Doing something that sucks every day
Visualization will never compensate the work undone
Digging into your “Cookie Jar”
40% Rule
What If?
Take inventory of the crap you're dealing with
What are the current factors limiting your growth and success? Is someone standing in your way? Are you standing in your own way?
Break out your journal and write your challenges all out in minute detail. Give you pain shape.
You will flip that pain on its head and use your story, your list of excuses to fuel your ultimate success.
Taking inventory and maybe sharing it with someone will begin to empower you to overcome.
2. Look at yourself in the Accountability Mirror
Look at yourself. There is no more time to waste. Hours and days evaporate like creeks in the desert. That's why it's OK to be cruel to yourself as long as you realize you're doing it to become better. We all need thicker skin to improve. Being soft when you look in the mirror isn't going to inspire the wholesale changes we need to shift our present and open up our future.
When you embark on a change, create a simple daily ritual that symbols the change - for DG it was shaving his head.
"Get your running shoes on", rain or shine.
Write your goals and next steps on post-it notes and tack them to your "Accountability Mirror".
Whether it's a career goal, a lifestyle goal, or an athletic one, you need to be truthful with yourself about where you are and the necessary steps it will take to achieve these goals, day by day. Each step, each necessary point of self-improvement should be written as its own note. You have to do some research and break it all down.
Whatever your goal, you'll need to hold yourself accountable for the small steps it will take to get there. Self-improvement takes dedication and self-discipline.
2. Start doing impossible tasks
Start stepping out of your comfort zone on a regular basis.
Write down in your journal all the things you don’t like to do or that make you uncomfortable. Especially the ones that are good for you.
Now go do one of them, and do it again.
This is not about changing your life instantly, it's about moving the needle bit by bit and making those changes sustainable. That means digging down to the micro-level and doing something that sucks every day. The more often you get uncomfortable, the stronger you become.
3. Master the Mind Game
Most battles we fight in life would be won or lost in our own minds.
Everything in life is a mind game. The only person you're playing against is yourself. Whenever we get swept under by life's dramas, large and small, we are forgetting that no matter how bad the pain gets, no matter how harrowing the torture, all bad things end.
Choose any competitive situation that you're in right now. Who is your opponent? No matter how they're treating you there is one way to not only earn their respect but turn the tables. Excellence. Make them pay attention by being excellent.
4. Push the hardest when you want to quit. Visualize success and challenges
Do your best work when you feel the least motivated.
Choose any obstacle in your way, or set a new goal, and visualize overcoming or achieving it. Before engaging in any activity, paint the picture of what your success looks and feels like.
Visualize the challenges that are likely to arise and determine how you will attack those problems when they do.
You can't prepare for everything but if you engage in strategic visualization ahead of time, you'll be as prepared as you possibly can be.
Be prepared to answer simple questions: Why are you doing this? What is driving you toward this achievement?
But remember: visualization will never compensate for work undone.
5. Dig into your Cookie Jar
Take inventory of your Cookie Jar. Don't just write your achievements. Include life obstacles you've overcome. Add the minor tasks you failed earlier in life, but tried again and ultimately succeeded.
The Cookie Jar is the system that reminds us who we are when we are at our best.
The human body can withstand and accomplish a lot more than most of us think possible, and it all begins and ends in the mind.
Set ambitious goals before each workout and let the past victories - cookies from your Cookie Jar - carry you to your new personal best. The Cookie Jar concept helps you to remember what a warrior you are so you can use that energy to succeed again in the heat of the battle.
6. Follow the 40% Rule
We habitually settle for less than our best; at work, in school, in our relationships, and on the playing field or racecourse. We settle as individuals, and we teach our children to settle for less than their best, and all of that ripples out, merges, and multiplies within our communities and society as a whole.
Most of us give up when we've only given around 40 percent of our maximum effort. Even when we feel we've reached our absolute limit, we still have 60% more to give! Once you know it to be true, it's simply a matter of stretching your pain tolerance, letting go of your identity and all your self-limiting beliefs, so you can get to 60%, then 80%, and beyond without giving up. If you follow this 40% rule you will unlock your mind to new levels of performance and excellence in sport and in life, and your rewards will run far deeper than mere material success.
We don't all have the same floor or ceiling, but we each have a lot more in us than we know. Our job is to push past our normal stopping point.
You should catalog your weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Don't ignore them. In a high-stress environment, your weaknesses will surface like bad karma, build in volume and overwhelm you. Unless you get ahead of them first.
We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.
7. Go on a twenty-four-hour mission every single day
Our culture has become hooked on the quick-fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There's no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you're lucky, but it will not lead you to self-mastery. If you want to master the mind, you have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to build them up.
Schedule your life like you're on a twenty-four-hour mission every single day. Analyze your schedule, kill your empty habits, burn out the time-wasters, and see what's left. Now maximize that.
Give yourself a three-week challenge. Week 1. Go about your normal schedule but take notes. Week 2. Build your optimal schedule. Week 3. By this week, you should have a working schedule that maximizes your effort without sacrificing sleep.
8. Become uncommon amongst the uncommon
A lot of people think that once they reach a certain level of status, respect, or success, that they've made it in life. But you always have to find more. Becoming uncommon amongst the uncommon will require sustaining greatness for a long period of time.
Torch the complacency you feel gathering around you, your coworkers, and your teammates. Continue to put obstacles in front of yourself, because that's where you'll find friction that will help you grow even stronger.
9. Learn from your failures
A lot of us surround ourselves with people who speak to our desire for comfort. 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.
Write our all the good things, everything that went well, from your failures. Note how you handles your failure, how it affected your life and relationships. Now make a list of things you can fix, be brutally honest. Then, look at your calendar and schedule another attempt as soon as possible.
10. Ask, What If?
Pain unlocks a secret door in our minds. One that leads to both peak performance and beautiful silence.
Life is suffering. To exist in this world, we must contend with humiliation, broken dreams, sadness and loss. That's just nature.
We live a life defined by the limits we imagine and desire for ourselves because it's comfortable in that box. The limits we create become the lens through which the others see us. But for some, those limits start to feel like bondage.
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 other external chatter by asking, What If?
“What if?” is a reminder that you don't really know what you're capable of until you put everything you've got on the line. It makes the impossible feel at least a little more possible.