everything I had gone through I realized that the human mind if you can put it in a very quiet calm place and get it to calm down and not be so [ __ ] that you could possibly make this work out for you how bad how bad are you really so I calmed myself down and I had to make this enormous thing small I had 30 more miles to run and my body was in the worst shape in my entire life the worst pain I ever felt in my life so I broke this 30 mil
thing down I broke it down to small chunks I Cal my mind down I had to get water had to get potassium had to get sodium I had to stop being so dizzy cuz I I had to be able to stand up so my disiness went away after about an hour I was able to stand up now and I was going around this track at like 30 some minute mile and I never get my crew person saying hey I got to mile 81 it said you're not going to make the time I had 24 hours
and I was going so slow taking so much time this is when I realized that the human mind once everything gets connected Once the mind knows you're not going to quit something it's going to try to find more it's going to try to give you more once it realizes you're not going to take the path of least resistance you're going to stay here until it's done my mind in my body and my spirit became one for the first time ever for the first time ever it became one and I went to a level that I
never thought was humanly possible for myself or anybody else in that shape that I was in I was able to run 19 miles and I ran 19 miles did 100 miles actually did one more mile I did 101 miles in 18 hours and 56 minutes I'd overcome so many obstacles in my life and this was the fin Crucible for me and I got through it and at the end of this race was such Clarity to me and it was just um the most amazing thing I ever do in my life I was at the very
edge of my capability and wasn't sure that I could take one more step I felt like I drained 99% from my tank at least my gas light was on my engine shuttering yet I knew I had to find more if I was going to finish this race and get myself into bad water but how do you push yourself when pain is all you feel with every step when Agony is the feedback loop that permeates each cell in your body begging you to stop that's tricky because the threshold for suffering is different for everybody what's Universal
is the impulse to succumb to feel like you've given everything you can and that you are justified in leaving a job undone by now I'm sure you can tell that it doesn't take much for me to become obsessed some criticize ize my level of passion but I'm not down with the prevailing mentalities that tend to dominate American society these days the ones that tell us to go with the flow or invite us to learn how to get more with less effort [ __ ] that shortcut [ __ ] the reason I embrace my own obsessions
and demand and desire more of myself is because I've learned that it's only when I push Beyond pain and suffering past my perceived limitations that I'm capable of accomplishing more physically and mentally in endurance races but also in life as a whole and I believe the same is true for you the human body is like a stock car we may look different on the outside but under the hood we all have huge reservoirs of potential and a governor impeding us from reaching our maximum velocity in a car the governor limits the flow of fuel in
air so it doesn't burn too hot which places a ceiling on performance it's a hardware issue the governor can easily be removed and if you disable yours watch your car rocket Beyond 130 mph it's a subtler process in the human animal our governor is buried deep in our minds interwined with our very identity it knows what and who we love and hate it's read our whole life story and forms the way we see ourselves and how we'd like to be seen 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 and an engine ours can't stop us unless we buy into its [ __ ] and agree to quit sadly most of us give up when we've only given around 40% of our maximum effort even when we feel like we've reached our absolute limit we still have 60 % 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% then 80% and Beyond without giving up I call this the 40% Rule and the reason it's so powerful is that if you follow it you will unlock your mind to new levels of performance and Excellence since Sports and in life and your rewards will run far deeper than mere material success the 40% rule can be applied to everything we do because in life almost nothing will turn out exactly as we hope there are always
challenges and whether we are at work or school or feeling tested within our most intimate or important relationships we will all be tempted to walk away from commitments give up on our goals and dreams and sell our own happiness short at some point because we will feel empty like we have no more to give when we haven't tapped even half of the TR buried deep in our minds hearts and souls I know how it feels to be approaching an energetic dead end I've been there too many times to count I understand the Temptation is so
short but I also know that impulse is driven by your mind's desire for comfort and it's not telling you the truth it's your identity trying to find Sanctuary not help you grow it's looking for status quo not reaching for greatness or seeking wholeness but the software update that you need to shut your Governor down is no supersonic download it takes 20 years to gain 20 years of experience and the only way to move beyond your 40% is to callous your mind day after day which means you'll have to chase pain like it's your day damn
job imagine you're a boxer and on your first day in the ring you take one on your chin it's going to hurt like [ __ ] hell but a year T of being a boxer you won't be stopped by one punch you'll be able to absorb 12 rounds of getting beat the down and come back the very next day and fight again it's not that the punch has lost power your opponents will be even stronger the change has happened within your brain you've calloused your mind over a period of time your tolerance for mental and
physical suffering will have expanded because your software will have learned that you can take a hell of a lot more than one punch and if you stay with any task that is trying to beat you down you will reap rewards not a fire say you like to run but have a broken pinky toe I'll bet if you continue running on it pretty soon you'll be able to run on broken legs sounds impossible right I know it's true because because I've run on broken legs and that knowledge helped me endure all manner of agonies on the
ultra circuit which has revealed a clear spring of self-confidence that I drink from whenever my tank is dry but nobody Taps their Reserve 60% 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 that you haven't given it your all not even close buying into that will keep you in the fight and that's worth an
extra 5% of course that's easier listen than done it wasn't easy to begin the fourth lap of the hurt 100 because I knew how much it would hurt and when you are feeling dead and buried dehydrated rung out and torn the up at 40% finding that extra 60% feels impossible I didn't want my suffering to continue nobody does that's why the line fatigue makes cowards of us all is true as mind you I didn't know anything about the 40% rule that day the hurt 100 is when I first started to contemplate it but I had
hit the wall many times before and I had learned to stay present and openminded enough to recalibrate my goals even at my lowest I knew that staying the fight is always the hardest and most rewarding first step of course it's easy to be open-minded when you leave yoga class and are taking a stroll by the beach but when you're suffering keeping an open mind is hard work the same is true if you are facing a daunting Challenge on the job or at school maybe you are tackling a 100 question test and know that you brick
the first 50 at that point it's extremely difficult to maintain the necessary discipline to force yourself to keep keep taking the test seriously it's also imperative that you find it because in every failure there is something to be gained even if it's only practiced for the next test you'll have to take because that next test is coming that's a guarantee the 1 second decision is I had to live through that 1 second decision several times during this race so this race took me aund and some hours okay and this is what people don't get for
you to finish that race even though I dnfed I still finished in the time so there's a lot of pride in that so what I do in that one second because we all think about quitting hard but what you have to do in that one second is hard to process information during pain because that pain takes over and you can't think rationally you're thinking about fight ORF flight save yourself that's not a rational thought it's not a thought that's going to get you through hard times most people fail that one second so what happens what
I do in that one second it's and there's a bigger process to all this but in that one second I physically stayed in that water because if I get out of the water I quit so I physically stay in the water but mentally I'm on the beach with the instructors and the instructors is cold outside so they got these Parkers on they got their cup of Joe and they're warm cuz they've already been through it so now it's your turn to go through it so m i get back with them I'm still in the water
physically but mentally I'm back with I'm chilling I got my Parker on and now I'm thinking logically cuz I'm warm now mentally I'm warm I've taken that one second let's not quit yet Goggins let's think about your options where are you going to end up if you quit this where you going to go what are you going to say to yourself because you know you're going to get warm the second you get out this water you could take a shower and you could be warm and you could be and in 5 days you could be
out so I start thinking logically I calm my brain down because your brain just wants to get the out ring the bell push your Hamet down get warm and then you're really and these are the things you have to think about the one second decision so that's what that's all about it's about gaining control of your mind putting things back in the proper perspective and then saying I do want to be here and I'm going to have a bunch of these 1 seconds through this 130 hour journey and I have to learn to control these
because if I fail one of these one seconds I will not be a seal I will not be a doctor I will not be a lawyer I will not be whatever the it is so that's how important that one second decision is it's all about your mind takes control of you you have to say you I run this and that's what that's all about we must create a system that that constantly reminds us who the we are when we are at our best because life is not going to pick us up when we fall there
will be Forks in the road knives in youring back mountains to climb and we are only capable of living up to the image we create for ourselves prepare yourself we know life can be hard and yet we feel sorry for ourselves when it isn't fair from this point forward accept the following as goggin's laws of nature you will be made fun of you will feel insecure you may not be the best all the time you may be the only black white asian latino female male gay lesbian there will be times when you feel alone get
over it our minds are fing strong they are our most powerful weapon but we have stopped using them we have access to so many more resources today than ever before and yet we are so much less capable than those who came before us if you want to be one of the few to defy those Trends in our ever softening Society you will have to be willing to go to war with yourself and create a whole new identity which requires an open mind it's funny being openminded is often tagged as new age or soft that being
open-minded enough to find a way is old school it's what knuckle draggers do and that's exactly what I did failure is just a word for me failure was me having more information on how to succeed that's all failure became to me so I failed so much pull-up records running events had to quit this buds Rangers all this crap I had to go back through all that was was oh I failed because of these reasons here go back to the drawing board figure out the right equation put it together go back fail again oh but I
got more information so everything I was afraid of I made sure to meet it right in the face and overcome [Music] it
