PDF Summary:Can't Hurt Me, by David Goggins

In Can’t Hurt Me, former Navy SEAL David Goggins describes his transformation from someone who let his circumstances control him to someone who proactively seeks greatness by tackling new challenges. He thinks everyone can work to cultivate a drive for self-improvement in order to overcome obstacles and reach their goals.

Most of us only give 40 percent of our effort, leaving 60 percent on the table and falling short of our potential. Goggins offers 10 actionables to help people push themselves to address obstacles and work efficiently toward their goals.

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When working toward your goals, it’s easy to sabotage your success by doubting yourself. For example, you might feel intimidated by your opponents—anyone who you think doubts your ability to succeed, and who makes you doubt yourself. This could be a boss, teacher, or coworker.

Instead, work to harness your feelings around that perceived doubt and use them to apply yourself and prove your opponent wrong.

Hell Week

Goggins needed to survive grueling training to become a SEAL. During Hell Week, the recruits are broken into teams and subjected to hours of physically demanding tasks.

Goggins realized that he wanted some tools to help him best his opponents—the officers leading them in the exercises who wanted them to fail. Toward the end of Hell Week, Goggins’s team was exhausted. Goggins knew that the men on his team needed to harness their remaining energy to keep going and exceed their superiors’ expectations, earning their respect. He reminded his team about how the officers wanted to break them down and encouraged them to find the energy to succeed and not give them the satisfaction. Goggins calls this “taking souls”—acknowledging your opponents and using your feelings toward them to fuel your best work, take them by surprise, and earn their respect.

Using these strategies, Goggins and his entire team survived Hell Week, with no one going home.

Take Action

Here’s how to use your feelings about your opponent to your advantage:

1. Identify a challenge or competitive situation you face. For example, maybe you’re struggling to excel at work or get a good grade in math class.
2. Identify the opponent you face in that situation. Maybe you’re struggling at work because your boss insists on micromanaging your every move, or maybe you feel like your math teacher doesn’t believe in you.
3. Choose a project or other task you can do to showcase your skills. It could be creating a stellar proposal for work or getting a perfect score on an exam.
4. Take the negative energy you have toward the obstacle or opponent and channel it to excel in your project. If you need to improve your skills to succeed, you might need to do things like studying more or working out outside of practice. Your ultimate goal is to amaze your opponent and earn their respect by vastly exceeding their expectations.

Challenge 5: Visualize Success

Learning to visualize the obstacles in your way and how achieving your goal will feel helps you keep going and address obstacles as they arise.

Hitting the Ground Running

After spending some time at home to recover from a knee injury, Goggins developed stress fractures in his shins and had 6 months to go before completing SEAL training. When he’d start to doubt himself, he’d give himself talks of encouragement—saying that the only guaranteed way to fail is to quit, and championing his personal strength for pushing through on broken shins. He also visualized how accomplished he’d feel when he completed training.

After he graduated training, he felt motivated to continue defying the odds completing the world’s toughest challenges.

Take Action

Practice visualizing your obstacles and successes with these two steps:

1. Visualize a challenge or obstacle you need to overcome. Think about what it will look like and feel like when you do.
2. Anticipate difficulty. Think about the obstacles you may face ahead of time and develop a plan to address them.

Challenge 6: Stock Your Cookie Jar

Another strategy to keep yourself working toward your goals even when you face obstacles is reminding yourself of your previous accomplishments. Goggins calls this collection of accomplishments your Cookie Jar.

San Diego One Day

While Goggins worked for the navy, he decided to raise money for the families of fallen soldiers by participating in ultra racing—running races longer than a marathon. He wanted to compete in the Badwater 135, a 135-mile race in California from the floor of Death Valley to the pinnacle of Mount Whitney.

To do so, he needed to compete in other ultramarathons first. He decided to compete in the San Diego One Day, but he was ill-prepared—in the previous 6 months, he had focused primarily on strength training and hadn’t run more than a mile at a time. By mile 70, he couldn’t go further.

After getting some assistance from his support team, he realized he could draw on another strategy to prevent him from quitting—his mental cache of past victories, or Cookie Jar. Thinking about his past victories and recognizing his toughness gave Goggins strength to finish the race.

Take Action

Here’s how to build your own cookie jar:

1. Use your journal to write down your major life victories. Examples include exceeding a sales goal, running a half marathon, or convincing the city council to fund homelessness services.
2. Write down all of the obstacles you’ve overcome, too. Examples include managing obsessive compulsive disorder, stopping smoking, or improving your relationship with your parents.
3. As you work toward your goals, draw on this list to help you when you want to quit.

Challenge 7: Dismantle Your Governor

Cars have an internal regulator, or governor, that limits how fast they can go. Humans are the same way—our mental governor gives us feedback, telling us if we’re in pain or feeling insecure. Many people listen too readily and stop doing a task when they’ve applied only 40 percent of their effort, leaving 60 percent on the table. Pushing past the governor means pushing through pain, insecurities, and other things that make us want to quit before we’ve given our full effort.

The Hurt 100

Goggins learned how to manage his Governor as he competed in additional ultra races to qualify for the Badwater 135.

Despite Goggins’s physical preparation for a race called the Hurt 100, the course was still extremely demanding. He encountered three main challenges:

• His Camelbak, a water reservoir he could wear running, broke just 6 miles into the race.
• He wasn’t used to running on trails. Trails have more obstacles than a typical asphalt road, including rocks, tree roots, and mud.
• He was dealing with pain in his legs.

Goggins realized that he could convince himself to keep going by dividing the remainder of the race into chunks. He’d say things like, “I just want to get to the top of that hill, then I can quit.” But instead of wanting to quit, doing that inspired him to keep going.

Finding motivation to persist helped him dismantle his governor. By showing himself that he could keep going even when he didn’t want to, he adjusted his expectations of how far he could push himself.

He was able to finish the race, and later that same day, submitted his application for Badwater 135. The director told him he was accepted a few days later.

Badwater 135

Though he was arguably more prepared for this race than any he’d done before, Goggins still faced difficulty and wanted to quit. He became severely dehydrated about 7.5 hours in. To get through this, he worked to drink more water than he wanted, getting around his governor. (Shortform note: Sometimes, the thought of drinking a lot of water can be nauseating to a severely dehydrated person.) Ultimately, he came in fifth place.

Take Action

To learn to push past your natural stopping point, try these steps:

1. Go as far as you naturally feel you can. For example, maybe you can run for 15 minutes.
2. Once you think you’re at your max, coax yourself to go a bit further. Assess if you actually have energy to go further and talk to yourself about your specific next steps. For example, if you’ve already run 15 minutes and desperately want to stop, try to go another 2 minutes.

Challenge 8: Compartmentalize Your Time

People often think they need to have special talents to succeed in life. However, you often won’t be naturally talented at something. Instead, you need to schedule time every day to practice and hone your skills.

For example, the number one excuse people have for not exercising is that they don’t have enough time. But most people waste 4-5 hours a day doing things like watching shows or looking at social media. Compartmentalizing your time helps you make time for the activities that matter to you.

Becoming a Recruiter

Shortly after completing a long-distance triathlon, a Navy admiral reached out to Goggins. He wanted Goggins to recruit people of color for operations against the Taliban in northern Africa.

Balancing Recruitment With Life

To recruit more people of color, Goggins traveled to colleges and high schools across the country to speak. He learned to use himself as a prop to get students interested in his message. He’d run 50 miles to his speaking engagement and show up sweaty, or spend the first five minutes of his speech doing push-ups. He recognized that most people wouldn’t be interested in becoming a SEAL, so he worked to appeal to a broader swath of people, encouraging them to live to their fullest potential.

Goggins learned to compartmentalize his time to have time for work and athletics. For example, when he wasn’t traveling, he’d fit physical training into his daily schedule by running or biking to work. This allowed him to exercise and work 50 hours per week.

Take Action

Do this challenge over 3 weeks:

1. In the first week, make detailed notes about how you spend each 15-30 minute chunk of your day. Note things like how much time you spend on your lunch break, how long your commute is, and whether you’re working without interruption or trying to multitask. Notice when you spend time that could be put toward working on your goals instead.
2. For the second week, schedule out your time. Decide what you’re going to do with each fifteen- to thirty-minute chunk of time in your day. This includes exercise and rest. Some activities will require multiple chunks of time. Just make sure you’re not trying to squeeze multiple tasks into the same chunk—focus on one activity at a time. Continue taking notes about how you spend your time.
3. For the third week, refine your schedule further based on your experience in the first two weeks. Ideally, you’ve arrived at a schedule that provides the maximum amount of time to do your important activities.

Challenges 9 and 10: Learn From Failure and Seek Greatness

Sometimes, we’re so scared of failing that we stop ourselves from even trying something. To avoid this, frame your failure as an opportunity to learn something so it feels less risky. Then, if you fail, you can evaluate the failure and refine your approach to reach your goal.

Once you’ve met your goal, push yourself to go above and beyond rather than settling to continuously improve yourself and achieve greatness that distinguishes you from others.

Breaking the Pull-Up Record

Goggins wasn’t content to be known just for his Navy career and ultra races. He realized that he did a lot of pull-ups as part of his regular training and wondered if he could break the world record for pull-ups in 24 hours.

It took him three tries to break the record. After each attempt, he evaluated what worked well and what needed improvement. He opted for a more private venue, a sturdier pull-up bar, and other fixes to diet and equipment to help him reach his goal.

Take Action

Learn to reflect on your failure with these steps:

1. Think of a recent failure.
2. Using a journal–on paper this time, if it isn’t already—ask the following questions to help you evaluate the failure:
   • What did you do well as you prepared for and executed the failure?
   • How did you handle the failure?
   • How did the failure affect your relationships with others?
   • How did it affect your life?
   • What could you have done differently?
3. (Optional) As soon as you can, schedule a time to make another attempt at the thing you failed at. If for some reason you can’t attempt the experience again, just do steps 1-2.

When you eventually reach your goal, it may be tempting to stop there. But many people operate this way. Instead, to set yourself apart from others, keep seeking new challenges rather than settling.