Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins is about his incredible transformation from a self-pitying youth to a retired US Navy SEAL that runs Ultramarathons and fights fires in California.
The book is packed with inspirational ideas and advice, but they are hidden within the chapters. On this page I’ve pulled direct quotes out of the book and organized them into 36 lessons. I plan on returning to this page whenever I need a surge of inspiration.
I highly recommend reading the book. You can learn more by reading my books notes.
Lesson 1: Go to War With Yourself
“Do you know who you really are and what you’re capable of?” “You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.” “If you do your job to the best of your ability, this will hurt. This mission is not about making yourself feel better. This mission is about being better and having a greater impact on the world.” “…it is up to you to equip yourself for the battle ahead. Only you can master your mind, which is what it takes to live a bold life filled with accomplishments most people consider beyond their capability.” “…I [know] from experience. That anybody can become a totally different person and achieve what so-called experts… claim is impossible, but it takes a lot of heart, will, and an armored mind.” “I hope you’re ready. It’s time to go to war with yourself”
Lesson 2: Truth Hurts… Use It To Fuel Your Improvement
“Self-improvement takes dedication and self-discipline. The dirty mirror you see every day is going to reveal the truth. Stop ignoring it. Use it to your advantage.” “I’ve got some news. You are stopping you! You are giving up instead of getting hard! Tell the truth about the real reasons for your limitations and you will turn that negativity, which is real, into jet fuel. Those odds stacked against you will become a damn runway!” “It’s okay to be unkind with yourself in these moments because we need thicker skin to improve in life.”
Lesson 3: Accept Yourself
“In a human being your character is your foundation, and when you build a bunch of successes and pile up even more failures on a fucked-up foundation, the structure that is the self won’t be sound. To develop an armored mind – a mindset so calloused and hard that it becomes bulletproof – you need to go to the source of all your fears and insecurities.” “Anyone who is of sound mind and body can sit down and think of… things in their life that could have gone differently. Where maybe they didn’t get a fair shake and where they took the path of least resistance… its up to you to go back through your past and make peace with yourself by facing those incidents and all of your negative influences, and accepting them as weak spots in your own character. Only when you identify and accept your weaknesses will you finally stop running from your past.”
Lesson 4: Taking Souls – Strive For Excellence:
“Taking someone’s soul means you’ve gained a tactical advantage. Life is all about looking for tactical advantages…” “No matter how they’re treating you there is one way to not only earn their respect, but turn the tables. Excellence.” “Whatever it is, I want you to work harder on that project or in that class than you ever have before. Do everything exactly as they ask, and whatever standard they set as an ideal outcome, you should be aiming to surpass that.” “Whoever you’re dealing with, your goal is to make them watch you achieve what they could never have done themselves. You want them thinking how amazing you are. Take their negativity and use it to dominate their task with everything you’ve got. Take their motherfucking soul!” “…remember, this is a game you’re playing within yourself… In fact, they never need to know you’re playing this game. This is a tactic for you to be your best when duty calls. It’s a mind game you’re playing on yourself.”
Lesson 5: Discomfort Callouses Your Mind
“Life experience, especially negative experiences, help callous the mind.” “Doing things – even small things – that make you uncomfortable will help make you strong. The more often you get uncomfortable the stronger you’ll become, and soon you’ll develop a more productive, can-do dialogue with yourself in stressful situations.”
Lesson 6: Schedule Suffering Into Your Day – Pain Is Part of the Process
“It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day, but if you do, you’ll find that at the other end of that suffering is a whole other life just waiting for you.” “…I brainwashed myself into craving discomfort.”
Lesson 7: Remember Your Cookie Jar (Past Successes)
“…the Cookie Jar became a concept I’ve employed whenever I need a reminder of who I am and what I’m capable of. We all have a cookie jar inside us, because life, being what it is, has always tested us.” “Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in so you can power through obstacles.” “It will allow you to control and manage doubt, and keep focused on taking each and every step necessary to achieve the task at hand.” “…digging into the Cookie Jar when things are going south takes focus and determination because at first the brain doesn’t want to go there. It wants to remind you that you’re suffering and that your goal is impossible.” “The Cookie Jar is your shortcut to taking control of your own thought process. Use it that way! The point here isn’t to make yourself feel like a hero for the fuck of it. It’s not a hooray-for-me session. It’s to remember what a badass you are so you can use that energy to succeed again in the heat of battle!”
Lesson 8: Life Isn’t Going To Pick You Up When You Fall
“That’s one reason I invented the Cookie Jar. We must create a system that constantly reminds us who the fuck we are when we are at our best, because life is not going to pick us up when we fall… we are only capable of living up to the image we create for ourselves… We know life can be hard, and yet we feel sorry for ourselves when it isn’t fair… Get over it!”
Lesson 9: Your Own Thoughts Can Break You
“…it’s not the external voice that will break you. It’s what you tell yourself that matters. The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself.” “Very few people even bother to try to control the way their thoughts and doubts bubble up. The vast majority of us are slaves to our minds.”
Lesson 10: Be Hard On Yourself but Also Celebrate Success
“Yeah, I was hard on myself…, but I also praised myself whenever I could claim a small victory, because we all need that, and very few of us take the time to celebrate our successes.”
Lesson 11: Don’t Listen To Your Human Governor Telling You To Stop
“…we all have huge reservoirs of potential and a governor impeding us from reaching our maximum velocity.” “Our governor is buried deep in our minds, intertwined with our very identity… It’s the software that delivers personalized feedback – in the form of pain and exhaustion, but also fear and insecurity, and it uses all of that to encourage us to stop before we risk it all. But, here’s the thing, it doesn’t have absolute control. Unlike the governor in an engine, ours can’t stop us unless we buy into its bullshit and agree to quit.”
Lesson 12: The 40% Rule
“Sadly, most of us give up when we’ve only given around 40 percent of our maximum effort. Even when we feel like we’ve reached our absolute limit, we still have 60 percent more to give! That’s the governor in action! Once you know that to be true, it’s simply a matter of stretching your pain tolerance, letting go of your identity and all your self-limiting stories, so you can get to 60 percent, then 80 percent and beyond without giving up.”
Lesson 13: Seek Out Difficulties To Expand Your Capabilities
“…the only way to move beyond your 40 percent is to callous your mind, day after day. Which means you’ll have to chase pain like it’s your damn job!” “…get to the point when you are so tired and in pain that your mind is begging you to stop. Then push just 5 to 10 percent further.” “But nobody taps their reserve 60 percent right away or all at once. The first step is to remember that your initial blast of pain and fatigue is your governor talking. Once you do that, you are in control of the dialogue in your mind, and you can remind yourself that you are not as drained as you think.”
Lesson 14: It’s All About Work Ethic – Become Addicted To Hard Work
“If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up. My work ethic is the single most important factor in all of my accomplishments. Everything else is secondary, and when it comes to hard work, whether in the gym or on the job, The 40% Rule applies.”
Lesson 15: Work Hard Now To Prepare For Life’s Future Obstacles
“The sole reason I work out like I do isn’t to prepare for and win ultra races… It’s to prepare my mind for life itself. Life will always be the most grueling endurance sport, and when you train hard, get uncomfortable, and callous your mind, you will become a more versatile competitor, trained to find a way forward no matter what. Because there will be times when the shit life throws at you isn’t minor at all. Sometimes life hits you dead in the fucking heart.”
Lesson 16: Physical Training Is A Perfect Way To Callous Your Mind
“Physical training is the perfect crucible to learn how to manage your thought process because when you’re working out, your focus is more likely to be single pointed, and your response to stress and pain is immediate and measurable.”
Lesson 17: Stop Wasting Time
“There are 168 hours in a week!… [That] means scheduling your life like you’re on a twenty-four-hour mission every single day.” “Evaluate your life in its totality! We all waste so much time doing meaningless bullshit… It’s up to you to find ways to eviscerate your bullshit.”
Lesson 18: Don’t Forget To Rest
“The whole point of the twenty-four-hour mission is to keep up a championship pace, not for a season or a year, but for your entire life! That requires rest and recovery time. Because there is no finish line. There is always more to learn, and you will always have weaknesses to strengthen if you want to become hard as woodpecker lips.” “Listen to your body, sneak in those ten-to-twenty-minute power naps when necessary, and take one full rest day per week… truly allow your mind and body to relax… It’s not a day to lose yourself in technology or stay hunched at your desk in the form of a damn question mark.”
Lesson 19: Becoming Uncommon
“No matter who you are, life will present you similar opportunities where you can prove to be uncommon. There are people in all walks of life who relish those moments, and when I see them I recognize them immediately because they are usually that motherfucker who’s all by himself. It’s the suit who’s still at the office… the badass who hits the gym directly after coming off a… op. She’s the wild-land firefighter who instead of hitting her bedroll, sharpens her chainsaw… that mentality is there for all of us… All over the world amazing human beings like that exist… It’s not about all the hard schools they graduated from, all their patches and medals. It’s about wanting it like there’s no tomorrow – because there might not be. It’s about thinking of everybody else before yourself and developing your own code of ethics that sets you apart from others. One of those ethics is the drive to turn every negative into a positive, and then when shit starts flying, being prepared to lead from the front.”
Lesson 20: Leader Mindset
“A true leader stays exhausted, abhors arrogance, and never looks down on the weakest link. He fights for his men and leads by example. That’s what it meant to be uncommon among uncommon. It meant being one of the best and helping your men find their best too.”
Lesson 21: You’re Always Getting Better or Worse
“No matter what [we] achieve… we can’t be satisfied. Life is too dynamic a game. We’re either getting better or we’re getting worse. Yes, we need to celebrate our victories… but after our celebration we should dial it down, dream up … new goals, and start at zero the very next day.”
Lesson 22: Stay Humble – There’s Always Room For Improvement
- “Always be willing to embrace ignorance and become the dumb fuck in the classroom again, because that is the only way to expand your body of knowledge and body of work. It’s the only way to expand your mind.” “We can always become stronger and more agile, mentally and physically. We can always become more capable and more reliable. Since that’s the case we should never feel that our work is done. There is always more to do.”
Lesson 23: Empowerment of Failure
- “In life, there is no gift as overlooked or inevitable as failure. I’ve had quite a few and have learned to relish them, because if you do the forensics you’ll find clues about where to make adjustments and how to eventually accomplish your task.” “You can’t let a simple failure derail your mission, or let it worm so far up your ass it takes over your brain and sabotages your relationships with people who are close to you. Everyone fails sometimes and life isn’t supposed to be fair, much less bend to your every whim.”
Lesson 24: Kill Your Entitlement – Earn It!
“It won’t always go your way, so you can’t get trapped in this idea that just because you’ve imagined a possibility for yourself that you somehow deserve it. Your entitled mind is dead weight. Cut it loose. Don’t focus on what you think you deserve. Take aim on what you are willing to earn!”
Lesson 25: Peaceful But Never Satisfied
“One of my mottos these days is peaceful but never satisfied. It was one thing to enjoy the peace of self-acceptance, and my acceptance of the fucked-up world as it is, but that didn’t mean I was going to lie down and wait to die…”
Lesson 26: Life Is Suffering
“The Buddha famously said the life is suffering. I’m not a Buddhist, but I know what he meant and so do you. To exist in this world, we must contend with humiliation, broken dreams, sadness, and loss. That’s just nature. Each specific life comes with its own personalized portion of pain. It’s coming for you. You can’t stop it. And you know it.”
Lesson 27: What If Mindset
“What if is an exquisite fuck-you to anyone who has ever doubted your greatness or stood in your way. It silences negativity. It’s 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. What if is the power and permission to face down your darkest demons, your very worst memories, and accept them as part of your history. If and when you do that, you will be able to use them as fuel to envision the most audacious, outrageous achievement and go get it.” “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 the other external chatter by asking, What if?”
Lesson 28: The One Warrior
“Out of every one hundred men ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior…” “From the time you take your first breath, you become eligible to die. You also become eligible to find your greatness and become the One Warrior.”
Lesson 29: It’s All On You
“It’s up to you to equip yourself for the battle – Only you can master your mind, which is what it takes to live a bold life filled with accomplishments most people consider beyond their capabilities.” “Most people hit a ceiling of potential due to their mental toughness. However, there will always be the 1 percent of us who are willing to put in the work to defy the odds.”
Lesson 30: Life Is A Mind Game
“The bottom line is that life is one big mind game. The only person you are playing against is yourself. Stick with this process and soon what you thought was impossible will be something you do every fucking day of your life.”
Lesson 31: Motivation Is Crap
“…motivation is crap. Even the best pep talk or self-help hack is nothing but a temporary fix. It won’t rewire your brain. It won’t amplify your voice or uplift your life.”
Lesson 32: Remain Vigilant After Successes
“When you transcend a place in time that has challenged you to the core, it can feel like you’ve won a war. Don’t fall for the mirage. Your past, your deepest fears, have a way of going dormant before springing back to life at double strength. You must remain vigilant.”
Lesson 33: Detest Mediocrity
”In society where mediocrity is too often the standard and too often rewarded… there is an intense fascination with men who detest mediocrity, who refuse to define themselves in conventional terms, and who seek to transcend traditionally recognized human capabilities.”
Lesson 34: Seek out the Flame – Bathe In Fire
“The SEALs were everything I wasn’t. They were about pride, dignity, and the type of excellence that came from bathing in the fire, getting beat the fuck down, and going back for more, again and again. They were the human equivalent of the hardest, sharpest sword you could imagine. They sought out the flame, took the pounding for as long as necessary, longer even, until they were fearless and deadly. They weren’t motivated. They were driven.”
Lesson 35: Always Stay On The Path
“Don’t let injuries or complications taking you off the path. Refocus your energy elsewhere until the situation is resolved. “Always be ready to adjust, recalibrate, and stay after it to become better, somehow.” “…anybody could change their life, so long as they kept an open mind, abandoned the path of least resistance, and sought out the difficult and most challenging tasks they could find.”
Lesson 36: Always Try To Know Why
“If you aren’t prepared in advance, if you allow your mind to remain undisciplined in an environment of intense suffering (it won’t feel like it, but it is very much a choice you are making), the only answer you are likely to find is the one that will make it stop as fast as possible. I don’t know.”