My Favorite Quotes

• So don’t lord it over them, because 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!
• The engine in a rocket ship does not fire without a small spark first. We all need small sparks, small accomplishments in our lives to fuel the big ones. It’s the small sparks, which start small fires, that eventually build enough heat to burn the whole fucking forest down.

📒 Summary + Notes

Denial is the ultimate comfort zone.

It’s like quicksand. It grabs you, sucks you under, and won’t let go. When life is like that it’s easy to drift and continue to make the same comfortable choices that are killing you, over and over again.

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. But 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.

Look, everybody learns in a different way and we’re gonna figure out how you learn.

I was one of those kids who thought he was gaming the system when, the whole time, I’d been gaming myself.

If any of that shit is stopping you from excelling in life, I’ve got some news. You are stopping you!

The only reason I didn’t become just another statistic is because, at the last possible moment, I got to work.

From then on, I brainwashed myself into craving discomfort. If it was raining, I would go run. Whenever it started snowing, my mind would say, Get your fucking running shoes on. Sometimes I wussed out and had to deal with it at the Accountability Mirror. But facing that mirror, facing myself, motivated me to fight through uncomfortable experiences, and, as a result, I became tougher. And being tough and resilient helped me meet my goals.

By the time I graduated, I knew that the confidence I’d managed to develop didn’t come from a perfect family or God-given talent. It came from personal accountability which brought me self-respect, and self-respect will always light a way forward.

“You cut corners and you are not gonna fucking make it”

Everything in life is a mind game! Whenever we get swept under by life’s dramas, large and small, we are forgetting that no matter how bad the pain gets, no matter how harrowing the torture, all bad things end.

That forgetting happens the second we give control over our emotions and actions to other people, which can easily happen when pain is peaking.

To make the split second-decision to ignore your weakened mind and keep moving. Know why you’re in the fight to stay in the fight!

And never forget that all emotional and physical anguish is finite! It all ends eventually. Smile at pain and watch it fade for at least a second or two.

Everything exactly as they ask, and whatever standard they set as an ideal outcome, you should be aiming to surpass that.

When you leverage a calloused mind like I did around the pool that day and keep fighting through pain, it can help you push your limits because if you accept the pain as a natural process and refuse to give in and give up, you will engage the sympathetic nervous system which shifts your hormonal flow.

Those mornings when going on a run is the last thing you want to do, but then twenty minutes into it you feel energised, that’s the work of the sympathetic nervous system. What I’ve found is that you can tap into it on call as long as you know how to manage your own mind.

But you don’t have to let your doubt into the cockpit! You can tolerate doubt as a backseat driver, but if you put doubt in the pilot’s seat, defeat is guaranteed.

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.

The reason it’s important to push hardest when you want to quit the most is because it helps you callous your mind. It’s the same reason why you have to do your best work when you are the least motivated. That’s why I loved PT in BUD/S and why I still love it today. Physical challenges strengthen my mind so I’m ready for whatever life throws at me, and it will do the same for you.

To develop an armoured mind—a mindset so calloused and hard that it becomes bulletproof—you need to go to the source of all your fears and insecurities.

Those that know don’t speak, and those who speak, well, they don’t know jack shit.

That’s when I finally realised that this fight wasn’t about Operation Red Wings or the families of the fallen. It was to a point, but none of that would help me run nineteen more miles before 10 a.m. No, this run, Badwater, my entire desire to push myself to the brink of destruction, was about me. It was about how much I was willing to suffer, how much more I could take, and how much I had to give. If I was gonna make it, this shit would have to get personal.

The engine in a rocket ship does not fire without a small spark first. We all need small sparks, small accomplishments in our lives to fuel the big ones.

It’s the small sparks, which start small fires, that eventually build enough heat to burn the whole fucking forest down.

You don’t have any big accomplishments to draw on yet, so be it. Your small victories are your cookies to savour, and make sure you do savour them.

Because in the heat of battle, when shit gets real, we need to draw inspiration to push through our own exhaustion, depression, pain, and misery. We need to spark a bunch of small fires to become the motherfucking inferno.

They’d give me pain killers and I didn’t want to mask this pain. I’d just accomplished the most amazing feat in my entire life.

If you’re more focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before, or read a record number of books in a given month. Your Cookie Jar can help there too.

Because if you perform this challenge correctly and truly challenge yourself, you’ll come to a point in any exercise where pain, boredom, or self-doubt kicks in, and you’ll need to push back to get through it.

Habitually settle for less than our best; at work, in school, in our relationships, and on the playing field or race course. We settle as individuals, and we teach our children to settle for less than their best, and all of that ripples out, merges, and multiplies within our communities and society as a whole.

The ones that tell us to go with the flow or invite us to learn how to get more with less effort. Fuck that shortcut bullshit. 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.

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.

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!

Sometimes the advice comes from a well-intentioned place. They really believe they are doing it for our own good but if you let them, these same people will talk you out of your dreams, and your governor will help them do it.

You will realise that if you were underperforming in your physical challenges, there is a good chance you are underperforming at school and work too.

The bottom line is that life is one big mind game. The only person you are playing against is yourself.

Our culture has become hooked on the quick fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. 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.

His priorities are clear, and he remains dedicated to his priorities. I’m not talking about general priorities here either. Each hour of his week is dedicated to a particular task and when that hour shows up in real time, he focuses 100 percent on that task. That’s how I do it too, because that is the only way to minimise wasted hours.

Evaluate your life in its totality! We all waste so much time doing meaningless bullshit.

Use your smartphone for productivity hacks, not click bait.

The activities we pursue tend to be our strengths because it’s fun to do what we’re great at. Very few people enjoy working on their weaknesses, so if you’re a terrific runner with a knee injury that will prevent you from running for twelve weeks, that is a great time to get into yoga, increasing your flexibility and your overall strength, which will make you a better and less injury-prone athlete. If you’re a guitar player with a broken hand, sit down at the keys and use your one good hand to become a more versatile musician.

The point is not to allow a setback to shatter our focus, or our detours to dictate our mindset. Always be ready to adjust, recalibrate, and stay after it to become better, somehow.

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 recognise them immediately because they are usually that motherfucker who’s all by himself.

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.

So don’t lord it over them, because 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!

Prejudice is everywhere. There is a piece of it in every person and each and every organisation, and if you are the only in any given situation, it’s on you to decide how you’re going to handle it because you can’t make it go away.

A lot of people think that once they reach a certain level of status, respect, or success, that they’ve made it in life. I’m here to tell you that you always have to find more. Greatness is not something that if you meet it once it stays with you forever. That shit evaporates like a flash of oil in a hot pan.

It requires staying in constant pursuit and putting out unending effort.

In the military, after every real-world mission or field exercise, we fill out After Action Reports (AARs), which serve as live autopsies. We do them no matter the outcome, and if you’re analysing a failure like I was, the AAR is absolutely crucial. Because when you’re headed into uncharted territory there are no books to study, no YouTube instructional videos to watch. All I had to read were my mistakes, and I considered all variables.

A lot of us surround ourselves with people who speak to our desire for comfort. People who would rather treat the pain of our wounds and prevent further injury than help us callous over them and try again. We need to surround ourselves with people who will tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear, but at the same time not make us feel we’re up against the impossible.

If I was going to be the next athlete to smash popular perception, I’d need to stop listening to doubt, whether it streamed in from the outside or bubbled up from within, and the best way to do that was to decide that the pull-up record was already mine.

Note: Whenever a doubt comes into his mind.. He overcomes by making more thoughtful ideas and back that up with logic and facts.

Was not in the mood to celebrate. Does that shock you too? You know that my refrigerator is never full, and it never will be because I live a mission-driven life, always on the hunt for the next challenge.

That mindset is the reason I broke that record, finished Badwater, became a SEAL, rocked Ranger School, and on down the list.

The Buddha famously said that life is suffering.

It’s coming for you. You can’t stop it. And you know it.

In response, most of us are programmed to seek comfort as a way to numb it all out and cushion the blows. We carve out safe spaces. We consume media that confirms our beliefs, we take up hobbies aligned with our talents, we try to spend as little time as possible doing the tasks we fucking loathe, and that makes us soft.

But it’s not the external voice that will break you down. It’s what you tell yourself that matters. The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself. You wake up with them, you walk around with them, you go to bed with them, and eventually you act on them. Whether they be good or bad.