retired navy seal david goggins is described as the toughest men on the planet holding the pull-up record 4 000 pull-ups in 17 hours he's also an ultra marathon runner with more than 60 races everybody thinks i'm superman i had to tell them the truth i was not always this strong guy you see david goggins is the only member of the u. s armed forces to ever complete seal training he beat the living hell out of me u. s army ranger school i had stuff on my notebook you know we're going to kill you and air force tactical air controller training that's when the real war started for me athlete speaker soldier and new york times bestselling author often referred to as the hardest [ __ ] on planet earth why is the truth so important i'm about seven eight years old and i hear some ruckus outside my room as i'm getting ready to bed down for the night and my dad is smacking the hell at my mom and knocks her she falls down he grabs him by her hair and drags her down stairs by her hair and so at this age i'm starting thinking man you know what the [ __ ] should i do man like you know i'm scared but then something in me saying you gotta go and do something so i go on the stairs and i jump on his back and he beat the living hell out of me and he beat me literally from my neck down to my ankles the next morning um i was gonna go to school half today my mom woke up and she pulled the covers back and when she saw how bruised i was i'll never forget looking at her face she was broke like she was just broken mom got courage to finally leave him when i was about eight years old we moved to a small town in brazil indiana and that's when the real war started for me there was about maybe 10 black families at about 10 000 people in town and in 1995 the kkk marched in the fourth of july parade so me being one of the few black kids in that you know in that area you know it kind of haunts you i had stuff on my notebook you know when you were going to kill you they had that on my car we're going to kill this is early 90s and um even though i showed it didn't hurt me it was jacking me up so all the insecurities i had when i was a kid with my father it just got worse and worse and worse and it [ __ ] haunted me but i was doing nothing about it and so my mom and i she was gone working three jobs we lived in a seven dollar a month place for a lot of the time and um she had a hard way to go i kept everything from her pretty much i felt like i was a man of the house so i didn't want her to know anything about my life i cheated all through school copy from the fourth grade to the to my junior year in high school on every assignment she got a letter in the mail from my high school and i'm a junior in high school and it later says pretty much your son's gonna flunk out he's missed 25 percent of school she was always gone so they were in school she read the letter to me she put my bed and i broke i broke i i couldn't imagine going back through that again and i started finding things that was comfortable and the more things i found comfortable the more uncomfortable my mind was and i gained 125 pounds in that time frame i went from 175 to almost 300.
i started working for a job called ecolab respray for cockroaches at 24. driving home turned the tv on and i was taking a shower i walked out heard these guys i saw these guys going in the water so i was terrified of it i can't even express and these guys ringing the bell quitting dropping their helmet down rolling out a lot of guys just leaving and it made me reflect on my fears my insecurities and i saw real men when i thought were real men who were staying who were overcoming adversity who were overcoming all these different things that i had blamed so many [ __ ] people in my life my dad my learning disability my my skin color you know me being everything and so um i sat there for a while and i was like no one's gonna can come to help me no one's gonna come to help me just give me against me period and i said the first thing i started doing is facing every [ __ ] fear i have at this point i actually drive back to buffalo new york to see my dad i haven't seen him in years because i realize now i gotta fix some [ __ ] i'm blaming everything but i need to go back to the root of the problem which is my dad i gotta face the demon i gotta go back and see what made him so [ __ ] up to make me so why am i [ __ ] up and i go back as an older man now i'm in my 20s i'm not a kid anymore and i realized he was the same man that he was i looked at him in a way we never said sorry to one another and he went off about my mom and my grandparents and all kind of [ __ ] but i looked at them in a way that i realized now why you [ __ ] this up somewhere in your [ __ ] life something [ __ ] you up and you didn't deal with it and so you put that [ __ ] on me my mom and everybody around you i'm gonna deal with my [ __ ] you gave me this i'm gonna fix it though i go home several months go by what it was i was obsessed with rocky when i was a kid i come every day and i would fast forward with the little vhs tapes to round 14. when apollo creek beat the [ __ ] [ __ ] out of rocky beat the [ __ ] out of him he kept fighting he was a dumb fighter that was me couldn't read couldn't write i probably showed him he was in that corner everybody was saying stay the down and him getting up him getting up apollo creed raised his arms up in the air turn around thought he won the fight he turns around and sees this guy getting up and it was the face of apollo creed that changed my life the face of apollo creed it was like just by that mother getting up not winning just by him getting the up rocky had taken his soul his head goes down he looks at him like what the [ __ ] are you but said this [ __ ] is going to keep coming after whatever the f is in front of him i want it to be that i wanted to feel something besides defeat i wanted to just go to distance i wanted that worse than anything in the world and now i'm like okay here we go it's time to be a navy seal hell week is 130 hours of continuous training you might get two hours of sleep and what it does is it's designed to break a man if you only fix the surface you will never get through hell week we're all you know a lot of us are going through a hard time in life some people have been bullied some people are just stressed out some people are insecure and the world puts a lot of this [ __ ] in your mind it's not just you i had to develop a mindset a mindset that was indestructible i had to armor plate my mind it's about what you're saying to yourself but it also comes at work we have a factory a nice governor in our brain and it's a survival mechanism it protects us from pain and suffering the second we feel that [ __ ] our mind says oh no this isn't fun we should back off we should sit down find something more comfortable it knows what you're afraid of it knows your insecurities it knows your deep dark lives and it starts to push you away from that [ __ ] it pushes you in a direction that is comfortable this is the time where you have to gain control back of your mind i had to build calluses in my brain the same way i built calluses on my hands the only way i can turn around is put myself through the worst things possible a human being can ever endure and that'll be the only way that i can build this brain to handle anything that comes in front of it retired navy seal david goggins is described as the toughest men on the planet you're the only member of the u.
s armed forces to have completed navy seal training u.
