Your Solo Mission

• “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”

Chapter Notes

Chapter 1: I Should Have Been a Statistic

• Bad Cards: Like a hand of cards, everyone is dealt a different set of circumstances when their life begins and as they continue to live. Everyone will be challenged at some point in life. You need to identify what these “bad cards” are. These are all the reasons why you shouldn’t amount to anything. These are the reasons why you should fail. Prove them wrong. Use this list of bad cards as fuel for your ultimate success.

Chapter 2: Truth Hurts

• “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.”
• “It’s okay to be unkind with yourself in these moments because we need thicker skin to improve in life.”
• “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!”
• Being Raw: Nobody is coming to save you or help you. It’s all up to you. Stop taking the easy way out and grow up. Stop being fluffy with yourself. Hold yourself accountable. Adopt a brutally honest tone with yourself. “…the only way we can change is to be real with ourselves.” Own it! If you’re lazy, say you’re lazy. If you’re fat, say you fat. Admit it. Be honest and truthful with yourself. “…it’s okay to be cruel with yourself as long as you realize you’re doing it to become better. We all need thicker skin to improve in life. 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.” Get to work. “I brainwashed myself into craving discomfort.”
• The Accountability Mirror: A tool to keep yourself accountable to improving yourself by placing post-it notes on a mirror. It’s used to abolish your ego and become the real you. There are two types of notes: Insecurity Notes and Task Notes. Start by making the Insecurity Notes. Make a note for everything you want to change about yourself – be raw, honest, and truthful with yourself. Then make Task Notes. Makes notes for goals you want to achieve. Then break down those goals and make notes for each step you need to do to get there. Now, every night you need to face your Accountability Mirror. Remind yourself of your goals and current insecurities. Identify the tasks you completed and what you need to do next. If you fail a task or wuss out, you will need to deal with it at the Accountability Mirror.
  • Insecurity Notes: These notes are used to remind you of what you want to change.
  • Task Notes: These notes are things you need to do in order to change.

Chapter 3: The Impossible Task

• “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.”

Chapter 4: Taking Souls

What is “Taking Souls”?

• This is a psychological technique you do with yourself to win any competition or overcome any obstacle. It’s purpose is to give yourself extra power (a second wind) to go hard, never give up, and win. It’s done by telling yourself that it’s your mission to make it so the opponent can’t stop thinking about you because of how unbelievable your performance is. No matter what happens, you work so hard and with such excellence that the person or obstacle can’t stop thinking about it. No matter what they throw at you, you can’t be broken. You’re un-phased. You’re always one step ahead. You’re everywhere they look. Everything they ask you to do, you do it quickly and even better. Penetrate their mind and taken over. Absorb everything they throw at you and use it as fuel to dominate them.
  • “I wanted to haunt them.. I wanted to occupy so much space in their minds…” “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!” “Make sure they see that shit, and when it’s time to deliver, surpass their maximum expectations.”

How To Take a Soul

• Step 1: Choose a competitive situation or obstacle. Identify what/who the enemy is. Recognize that they want you to fail, they want to be better than you, and they want to break you. They want to win.
• Step 2: Decide that you want to win. Decide that you’re going give such stellar performance that you’re going to shake them to their core. You’re going to do it by working hard with excellence and perseverance.
• Step 3: Continually look for tactical advantages. Prepare and plan for how you will dominate. Think about your weaknesses and how to overcome their. Think about their weaknesses and how to exploit them.
  • “Next, take inventory of your mind and body on the eve of battle. List out your insecurities and weakness, as well as your opponent’s.”
  • “If you can think two or three moves ahead, you will commander their thought process, and if you do that, you’ve taken their damn soul without them even realizing it.”
• Step 4: Work so hard that you take over their mind.

Notes on Taking Souls

• Know when to push boundaries and when to fall in line. Not every situation requires Taking Souls. Also, Taking Souls is not beneficial in every situation (ex: team settings with collaboration).
• Remember this is a mind game for yourself and not a tool to hurt others around you.“…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.”

Chapter 5: Armored Mind | Calloused Mind

“Until you experience hardships like abuse and bullying, failures and disappointments, your mind will remain soft and exposed. Life experience, especially negative experiences, help callous the mind.”

Your calloused mind has been forged by all the shit you’ve been through. Remember that you’ve been through hard times and that you’ve always survived to fight again. Use that knowledge to suppress any thoughts of fear, self-doubt, and insecurities. Use it to control your mind to focus on success.

• “Similar to using an opponent’s energy to gain an advantage, leaning on your calloused mind in the heat of battle can shift your thinking as well. 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.”
• “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.”

You need to accept yourself and your past mistakes. You can build armor on your mind but you also need to fix it within.

• “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.”

“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.”

Don’t measure yourself up against other people. Look inward. Measure yourself against who you’ve been.

Chapter 6: It’s Not About a Trophy

In order to drive and push hard you need to have a good answer to this simple question: “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.”

The Cookie Jar

• “…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. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time when you overcame odds and tasted success. It doesn’t have to be a big victory either. It can be something small.”
• “Yeah, I was hard on myself when I looked in the Accountability Mirror, 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.”
• “…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.”
• Use the Cookie Jar when negative thoughts start to overwhelm you. “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!”
• “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 sin’t fair… Get over it!”

Chapter 7: The Most Powerful Weapon

The Human Governor

• The governor is a piece of hardware in a car that limits the car’s performance so it doesn’t overheat… but the governor can be removed.
• “…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.”

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. I call this The 40% Rule…”
• “…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.”

Chapter 8: Talent Not Required

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

Compartmentalizing Your Day (Time-Boxing) – Every Day is a 24-Hour Mission

• “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.” “Analyze your schedule, kill your empty habits, burn out the bullshit, and see what’s left… Now maximize that shit.”
• Block everything you do (tasks, routines, chores, etc.) it chunks of time and schedule the ones you can into your day. During each chunk of time focus exclusively and relentlessly on the respective task until it’s completed.
  • “That means listing your prioritized tasks every hour of the day. You can even narrow it down to fifteen minute windows, and don’t forget to include backstops in your day-to-day schedule… If one task bleeds into overtime, make sure you know it, and begin to transition into your next prioritized task straight away.”
  • Backstops: Things that let you know you’ve gone too far or for too long. This can be alarms on your phone or timers you set. Or landmarks on a run.
• You must win the morning – get tasks done when nobody else requires your attention (other obligations)
• Don’t forget 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. If it’s a rest day, truly allow your mind and body to relax… A rest day means you should be relaxed, hanging with friends or family, and eating and drinking well, so you can recharge and get back at it. It’s not a day to lose yourself in technology or stay hunched at your desk in the form of a damn question mark.”

Chapter 9: Uncommon Amongst 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.”

“That’s the drawback of becoming uncommon amongst uncommon. You can push yourself to a place that is beyond the current capability or temporal mindset of the people you work with, and that’s okay. Just know that your supposed superiority is a figment of your own ego… it won’t help you advance as a team or as an individual in your field. Instead of getting angry that your colleagues can’t keep up, help pick your colleagues up and bring them with you!”

“If you truly want to become uncommon amongst the uncommon, it will require sustaining greatness for a long period of time. It requires staying in constant pursuit and putting out unending effort… Believe me, this is not for everyone because it will demand singular focus and may upset the balance in your life.”

Rank Zero Mindset

• “No matter what you or I achieve, in sports, business, or life, 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.”
• “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.”
• “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.”

Chapter 10: 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.”

“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!”

Perform After Action Reports: Analyze what went wrong from your failures and learn from them.

Chapter 11: What If?

“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…”

“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.”

“…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.”

“We are all our own worst haters and doubters because self-soubt 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?”

“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.”

Goggin’s 10 Challenges

1. Identify Your Bad Cards: Write down a list of anything that is currently limiting your growth and success. Write down any reason and anything that you think is holding you back. Share this list with anyone you want. Now, keep this list of reasons you should fail in your mind and use it as fuel.
2. Create Your Accountability Mirror: Create your own accountability mirror. Write down your insecurities and things you want to change. Write down all your goals and tasks you need to do. Then update and revise this every day.
3. Enter Your Discomfort Zone Regularly: Do something the sucks and makes you uncomfortable every day. Start small on the micro level so the changes are sustainable and build your way up to doing more. Make them harder and then find new things. (Examples: Make your bed, do dishes, iron clothes, wake up early, run every day)
4. Start Taking Souls: Pick a competitive situation or obstacle in your life that you want to dominate. Then work so hard that you take their soul.
5. Visualize Accomplishing Your Goals: Instead of focusing on things you can’t change and thinking random thoughts, take time to think about your goals. Visualize your success and how you will achieve it. Do this every day. Do it for small tasks and large goals. Visualize anything that will stand in your way and how you will overcome it. Use the feeling of your visioned success to drive you to actually achieve it.
6. Create Your Cookie Jar: Write down all your achievements, obstacles you’ve overcome, and things you’ve failed at end then overcame. Whenever pain tries to get you to stop, think about an item on this list and use it as fuel to keep going. Remember what it felt like to overcome them and then win.
7. Begin Removing the Governor From Your Brain: Slowly remove your governor by pushing yourself a little bit past your natural stopping points everyday. Go to when your mind is begging you to stop and then push 5-10% more.
8. Compartmentalize Your Daily Tasks Into Time Blocks: During week one, do your normal schedule but take detailed notes on what you do and how long it takes. During week two, build an optimal schedule by assigning blocks of times to each of the things you do. During each block focus on only one task. When one block ends switch to the next task. Make sure meal breaks are adequate and not open ended. Make sure to schedule exercise and rest.. and that you actually rest! Finally, during week three, adapt your schedule for anything that isn’t working and identify any extra dead space.
9. Become Uncommon Amongst Uncommon: Only accept this challenge if you’re willing to upset the balance in your life in pursuit of becoming the greatest at something. Select an area where you want to become the best. Then sacrifice everything you need to in order to get to the top and stay they for a long period of time. This requires constant pursuit and putting out unending effort.
10. Create After Action Reports For Your Failures: Identify some of your biggest or most recent failures, and do the following. First, write all the good things that went well. Then note how you think you handled the failure and it’s impact. Then go back through it and make a list of things you can fix (”This isn’t a time to be soft or generous. Be brutally honest…”). Then schedule or implement your fixes. Finally, keep your AARs handy and use what you’ve learned from them.

Misc Topics

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.”
• “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.”

Navy SEALs

• “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.”
• ”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. This is exactly the type of person BUD/S is meant to find. The man who finds a way to complete each and every task to the best of their ability. The man who will adapt and overcome any and all obstacles.”
• “Hell Week was a mind game. The instructors used our suffering to pick and peel away our layers, not to find the fittest athletes. To find the strongest minds. That’s something the quitters didn’t understand until it was too late.”
• “Hell Week is designed to show you that a human is capable of much more than you know. It opens your mind to the true possibilities of human potential, and with that comes a change in your mentality… You realize that no matter what [the instructors] do to you, they will never break you… You know if you don’t make it, [they] will beat you down… but for those of us knuckle draggers still in the mix, our attitude was, So the fuck be it!”
• “…we were looking for guys with heart. Men who knew it was going to be hard tomorrow and the day after that and welcomed every challenge. Men who wanted to become better athletes, and smarter and more capable in all aspects of their life. We wanted guys who craved honor and purpose and were open minded enough to face their deepest fears.”