David Goggins II

Published in Personal - 3 mins to read

When I first wrote about David Goggins last week, I did not expect to be writing another post about him. I thought I had seen 100 podcasts like his, that I had heard 100 identical stories, and that those stories were so removed from my own that I couldn't apply anything from them, apart from a short lived burst of inspiration. But, perhaps this time I was wrong. I like being wrong.

Today was... a day. For the first time in my life I very seriously considered calling a suicide hotline, after a terrible therapy session that left me feeling hopeless and broken. I pulled up the number for Samaritans while sat in the gym car park, and eventually figured I'd hit the weights first, and call later if I felt like it. Perhaps working out would give me the massive endorphin hit I needed to feel like I could get through another day.

In the end, it wasn't really the chemical rush that did it. I was resting in between sets (what kind of sadist puts 6 sets of 10 deadlifts on somebody's programme?!) and was considering both how I was going to manage to continue in the gym, as well as in life. After a while, I thought of some of the things Goggins said on his JRE podcast.

He repeated a few times that in order to cultivate a mindset like his, you had to constantly put yourself 'in hellacious situations'. Naturally he meant physically, but I often feel like my mental state could be adequately described by the phrase 'hellacious situation'. He described starting off the process of changing his life by tapping into something dark inside him - there is no shortage of darkness inside of me, ripe for the tapping. Once he had done something gruelling for the first, the next time he came to do it, he knew that he could accomplish it, purely because he already had. I feel like I have got through an innumerable number of rock bottom days in the last decade. I've spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating my own self inflicted death, but I am still here. I have done it before - I can do it again.

Goggins said he once sat on a panel discussing human mindset, and was taking questions from the audience. He tells the story of an old psychology professor describing the limits of the human mind - the limits that Goggins claims to have surpassed. The professor says his accomplishments were, essentially, impossible. Goggins didn't give a fuck what the professor thought - he thought anything was possible, and he was the proof.

Usually, I would side with the professor. I like to put my faith in science, to have my views backed by evidence, to believe that the world around us is quantifiable. But modern psychology seems like it's suffering a pretty major replicability crisis. And Goggins is very convincing. I view life like the professor, and a lot of my attempts at improving my mental health mostly involve adjusting my Bayesian hypothesis about life until I (hopefully) am left with a more desirable outcome. But it's not working, so perhaps Goggins is right. Peer reviewed journals are not immutable sources of knowledge - all that we can truly know is what we experience.

The last thing he said a lot, was that whenever he had to push through the pain of something seemingly unbearable, he would whisper to himself "I'm a bad motherfucker", in a badass, cool SEAL way that I could never emulate. But still...

Maybe I am a 'bad motherfucker' too.

See other posts in the David Goggins series