I’ve already said it before, some books just seem to find you at the right time.

David Goggins’s life has not been ordinary, from a very troubled childhood to achieving seemingly super human feats of endurance and strength, he has proven that the limits you think you have, are mostly in your mind.

I can’t quite remember how I learned about Can’t hurt me, what I can tell you is that it came to me at a very critical point in time.

Whenever I write about books, I usually focus on the takeaways, on the knowledge I think valuable to document and share.

This time however, I want to talk to you about something more personal.

The opportunity

Those that are close to me I’m sure have heard this already (a dozen times).

2020 has been a challenging year for everybody, interestingly, I saw 2020 coming before it arrived, I felt imminent change.

See, there really might be something about turning 40 - bear in mind, I just got to 39 in 2020, but the thought of my reaching 40 has been present in my mind for some time already, and as the time nears, all sorts of insights have been coming to me.

Out of those thoughts it is that I believed I identified a clear opportunity, the opportunity to define my future. The opportunity to determine what I wanted for myself in this new personal decade I am about to start.

It is an opportunity that had always been present, but that I had never seen as clearly.

As all of this was starting to build up in my mind, the pandemic hit, which was the perfect catalyzer.

An event that changed the rules, that enabled the reevaluation of everything we took for granted, an opportunity for quiet, for looking in and to those you really care for the most.

I thought to myself, this is the opportunity to redefine, to build that which I’ve been meaning to build all along.

I started strong and then … I failed - the first few months of the pandemic I lost focus, I started drinking every night, I couldn’t quite get myself to really push through with all the things I was dreaming of doing, all the ways I thought I would take advantage of this time with no travel, no restaurants, just family and myself.

I thought long and hard, I looked for the reasons I stumbled, and I came to realize they were not uncommon in my life.

I have built a good career, but it has not been without a big component of luck - success has come relatively easy for me, my brain works well, and I’ve been able to take advantage of it to, perhaps unaware at the time, make good decisions when opportunities simply presented themselves.

However, this time around luck and brains are not enough - they’re a good combination when things go smoothly, but if the luck starts running out, or when luck is not even a factor, there’s a huge gap between potential and realization, and I was stuck there, the pandemic and reaching 40 opened to the door for great opportunities, but they would not come out of lucky occurrences, they left a void for me to fill, and filling it required strategy, persistence, focus and hard work.

A good brain that made the right decisions when opportunities simply spawned in front was not enough, this time I actually had to create those opportunities - strategy, persistence and focus became critical, and it became clear, I struggled with all of them.

The real opportunity was not some project or business, the opportunity in front of me was to transform into somebody that could create opportunities through hard work, persistent and consistent effort, a clear target and focused strategy, and relentless drive.

Transformation or self-realization?

So I started reading - A LOT. I would take the thing that works well, my intellect, to get more and more data that would help me come up with strategies to strengthen those areas where I clearly struggled - willpower, focus, persistence.

Interestingly this was not quite a change in patterns, I’m sure you’ll see just as I do now, I simply gravitated (again) to what was always natural to me - use my brain to take advantage of an opportunity that spawned in front of me, luckily this time I was actually using my usual mental patterns towards actually enabling me to create opportunities, but this is not yet transformation, understanding what needs to change is far from actually producing any real change.

I then started to change habits, I realized how some usual things I did, some since my teens, were really just wasting my time and making me lose precious focus, and I started to make small changes by introducing small chunks of meditation throughout my day.

I reduced the use of Facebook and Instagram to once a day.

I decided to ignore the usual opinion as to how much time I should sleep (getting up in the morning meant an alarm clock and usually a handful of snoozes) and listen to my body and find the right sleep schedule for me - luckily I feel rested with less sleep than its usually recommended, I have not used an alarm clock to get up in months.

All of a sudden, my life started to change, and I realized I really had not transformed myself, I transformed my behavior, which in turn allowed me to start realizing my potential, it was always present.

Through years of good luck and effortless success I had turned soft, afraid of real struggles and somebody that bounced when things got hard, and then just waited for the next simple opportunity to come up that I could easily take advantage of.

And as I started to see my real potential, I became clearly aware of how I do not want to be “conventional”, how I refuse to accept “average returns” and “satisfactory” to characterize me and the things I do.

And then things got hard

I knew tests would come; I did not anticipate that they would come so fast, and would never stop.

Life is always uphill, either you are pushing up, or rolling down, there’s no in between, even standing in a single spot requires constant strength forward.

The higher you get, the more effort it takes to sustain acceleration, and honestly I don’t think there really is any escape velocity to this infinite gravity of life.

This is when Can’t hurt me “showed up”. Remember I mentioned before starting to tell you my story that books, knowledge, sometimes finds you at the right time? We’ve gotten there.

I made great progress, I reached goals and saw me hitting new milestones, but I feared the moment when things started to get hard, I knew that time would come, when all my efforts, the real change in my behavior, would be put to the test.

And that moment came within a year of me starting this whole process. I started to sense, to see confusion. As soon as I started hitting barriers, my mind questioned my purpose, it fumbled and struggled, trying to make me switch paths, trying to follow the usual pattern of pivoting to the next low hanging opportunity that, so far through luck alone, I usually found just waiting for me around the corner.

This is when the example set by David Goggins gave me the perspective I needed to overcome that challenge.

Can’t hurt me

David showed me a way to, in his words, “callous my mind”.

The bottom line is, your mind can work for you or against you, it can be there to introduce fear and doubt and influence you back to your comfort zone in an effort to protect you, or it can be there to remind you of all the challenges you’ve overcome and give you that fuel to keep pushing forward, to ignore the frustration and pain.

For me, the first step, and an indispensable practice to start really owning my mind, is meditation - it enabled me to observe the usual response without simply mindlessly following it, the usual response being the pivoting when things got tough.

From then on, it became an issue of dominating my thoughts, not letting this tendency to control me, and being very much aware that there is plenty capacity still available long past the point where my mind starts introducing doubt.

So, let me give you some of the tactics, influenced by David’s words, that have helped me:

• Did I mention meditation already? Meditate! This is not something I got from David’s book, but it is indispensable, you must be able to observe these tendencies of your mind at work and that alone requires training.
• Look in the mirror and make yourself accountable for your usual excuses.
• Sit down, and define your strategy. I wrote down every objective I had, and noted what I had done good, and what did not go well. This gave me clarity to see what I had to do next. This is not something you’ll have to do just once, this is a usual practice that you have to incorporate in your lifestyle.
• Organize you time. When there’s a lot to do time is your most precious asset. I created a very specfic plan of every waking minute of my week, and assigned a budget of time for every effort that is important to me, starting with those things that are non-negotiable, like my meditation, my health and my family.
• Realize that you have a lot more potential. This is straight out of Goggin’s book - know that when your mind tells you you’re at 100%, you haven’t even reached 50%.
• Introduce little changes that train you to push forward through discomfort. This is a mind training exercise to teach you to overcome the more difficult challenges you’ll find in the way. For example: Late at night and need to do the dishes, but you’re tired and just want to go to bed, force yourself to go and do the dishes! It will take 5 minutes, but it will start training your mind to not bail when you’re tired or experience discomfort. I switched to cold showers every morning, those 5 seconds of overcoming resistance to the shock of the cold water every day are small steps towards training my mind.
• Remember all the challenges you’ve overcome. Life is hard and you have overcome many challenges, so take the time to remember them, and use them when things get difficult to remind you of what you are capable of.

And I’d definitely suggest if you need a dose of motivation, read the book, it definitely did help me, at the right time!

There is no finish line, Goggins, there is no finish line.

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