Book SummaryCan't Hurt Me, by David Goggins

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Can't Hurt Me

In Can’t Hurt Me, 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.

Goggins provides ten challenges to help people work efficiently toward their goals.

Challenge 1: Face Your Bad Hand

As you grow up, your life circumstances can affect your growth and development. Though it seems counterintuitive, acknowledging the difficult circumstances you’ve faced can be a good first step toward overcoming additional challenges—you can draw strength from your past successes.

An Abusive Father and School Struggles

For Goggins, acknowledging and overcoming his school struggles and his abusive father opened new doors. Before age 8, Goggins lived with his mother, father, and brother in Buffalo, New York. His father frequently beat all of the family members. Due to working nights at his father’s roller skating rink, 8-year-old Goggins fell behind in school.

Eventually, his mother sought help from a friend to get herself and her children to safety, escaping to live in her hometown of Brazil, Indiana. In Brazil, Goggins faced an unsupportive 3rd-grade teacher. He developed a stutter and began cheating to pass.

Take Action

To begin confronting the obstacles you currently face, take stock of the circumstances that have shaped your life, past and present:

1. Start a journal. Paper or digital (on your laptop or phone) are both fine.
2. List all of the difficult things you’ve faced or face in life. Ask yourself the following questions to jog your memory:

• What difficult circumstances did you face growing up? For example, you might have faced abuse or felt low self-esteem. Or, did you grow up without major challenges and therefore fail to learn to push outside your comfort zone?
• What kinds of challenges do you face now? For example, maybe a boss is limiting your progress at work, or you’re sabotaging yourself in some way from moving forward.

Challenge 2: Set Up Your Accountability Mirror

You may struggle to take actionable steps to reach your goals. In this challenge, break your goals into smaller steps, regularly work toward them, and keep yourself accountable to achieve success.

As a teen, Goggins continued to struggle with racism, school, and a longing to join the Air Force, but he didn’t want to use his struggles as excuses. So he devised a way to make his goals more manageable: writing Post-it notes of goals on his mirror to hold himself accountable for reaching them.

Racism

When Goggins lived in Brazil as a young kid, he’d been unaware of racism. This started to change when he and his mother later moved back to Brazil from Indianapolis and he faced a slew of harassment, including being threatened at gunpoint on a rural road. He struggled to understand how people could be so hateful. He also felt the loneliness of being one of the only black people in town.

Goggins didn’t know how to channel these emotions. He started trying to come up with ways to get a rise out of the racists around him, wearing unusual clothing, trimming his hair in odd ways, and blaring music from his car.

School Struggles and Air Force Aspirations

Though Goggins was now in high school, he still relied on cheating to pass school and was reading at the 4th-grade level. He wanted to join the Air Force but didn’t realize he’d need to pass an aptitude test. He was unable to cheat, and he didn’t pass on his first attempt.

Then, at the end of his junior year, Goggins received a letter that he wouldn’t graduate unless his attendance record and grades improved during his final year. This moment led him to a self-reckoning in his bathroom mirror. He felt frustrated with who he saw that day—a kid with few prospects who wouldn’t be able to make it into the Air Force without getting tough with himself and changing his behavior. He resolved to reach his goal of getting into the Air Force by improving his reading skills and studying for the test.

Each night, he wrote his goals for the next day down on Post-it notes and placed them on the mirror, his “accountability mirror.” Then, he’d make sure he worked toward his goals each day. He’d give himself a tough talk about the steps he needed to take and why. For example, he’d call himself out for being stupid and tell himself he needed to study to fix that. He found this method more motivating than being gentle with himself.

Using his accountability mirror to work toward his goals allowed Goggins to pass the Air Force qualifying exam and graduate from high school.

Take Action

An “accountability mirror” helps you break your goals and dreams into manageable steps and offers a visible reminder of what you’re working toward. It’s called an accountability mirror because it helps you hold yourself accountable for taking the steps necessary to achieve your goals.

Using Post-it notes or paper (rather than digital means), follow these steps:

1. Write down all of your insecurities. Own your insecurities and use them as an opportunity to improve yourself.
2. Write down all of your goals and dreams. Break them into small, specific steps, written on separate Post-it notes. Stick all your notes on the mirror. Hold yourself to working on them each day. The insecurities could inspire your goals, but don’t have to be related.

Challenge 3: Get Used to Discomfort

Developing the mental willpower to do things that you dislike or that make you uncomfortable is another powerful tool to achieve your goals.

Air Force Stint

Goggins entered the Air Force because he wanted to become a pararescueman: a member of the Air Force troops that rescue downed pilots. But he faced a large obstacle: training to swim and rescue people in the water. Goggins had never taken swimming...

Can't Hurt Me Summary Introduction

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

As a young man, Goggins developed strategies to push himself to achieve more. He especially enjoyed physical challenges, serving in the Army and as a Navy SEAL and competing in ultramarathons and other athletic events. He always looked for ways to push himself to new heights.

Goggins’s experience has taught him that most people don’t recognize or work toward their true potential. Working toward new goals can be uncomfortable because we’re trying new things that don’t come...

Can't Hurt Me Summary Challenge 1: Face Your Bad Hand

As you grow up, your life circumstances can affect your growth and development. Though it seems counterintuitive, acknowledging the difficult circumstances you’ve faced can be a good first step toward overcoming additional challenges—you can draw strength from your past successes.

An Abusive Father and School Struggles

For Goggins, acknowledging and overcoming his school struggles and his abusive father opened new doors. Before age 8, Goggins lived with his mother, father, and brother in Buffalo, New York. His father forced the family members to work nights at his lucrative roller skating rink, called Skateland. If anything was out of place, like a missing pair of skates, Goggins’s father beat his son at home with a belt. His mother and brother faced regular abuse as well.

Eventually, his mother sought help from a friend to get herself and her children to safety. They escaped to her hometown of Brazil, Indiana, though his brother returned shortly thereafter to live with their father back in Buffalo. Goggins was 8 years old.

School Struggles

Due to his work at Skateland, Goggins had fallen behind in school. He, his brother, and mother worked at night, often...

Shortform Exercise: List Your Bad Hand

Reflect on the negative circumstances you’ve faced and are facing.

List out the difficult circumstances you faced growing up.

Can't Hurt Me Summary Challenge 2: Set Up Your Accountability Mirror

You may struggle to take actionable steps to reach our goals. In this challenge, you’ll learn to break your goals into smaller steps and regularly work toward them to achieve success.

As a teen, Goggins continued to struggle with trauma, racism, school, and longing to join the Air Force. After receiving a particularly bad report card, he devised a way to make his goals more manageable: writing Post-it notes of goals on his mirror to hold himself accountable for reaching them. Goggins called this his “accountability mirror.”

Trauma

In addition to the trauma Goggins faced at the hands of his father, another tragedy affected him and his mother in Indiana. His mother was engaged to be married to a man who was a good influence and provided some stability in their lives. They were scheduled to move into his Indianapolis home, but he was murdered days before the move.

Goggins and his mother moved to Indianapolis anyway, but his mother coped with her fiance’s death by busying herself with work. Goggins often skipped school and spent time with other kids, who negatively influenced his behavior. After his mom caught him skipping school with those students, she decided to move...

Shortform Exercise: Explore Your Insecurities

Learn to face yourself in the mirror.

What are 3-5 things you feel insecure about? For example, maybe you’re uncomfortable with your weight or wonder if people like you.

Can't Hurt Me Summary Challenge 3: Get Used to Discomfort

Sometimes reaching your goals requires facing uncomfortable or difficult tasks. Learning how to do things you dislike helps you take steps toward your goals instead of staying in your comfort zone.

Goggins learned to face what made him uncomfortable during his service in the Air Force and the struggles afterward that motivated him to become a Navy SEAL.

Air Force Stint

Goggins entered the Air Force because he wanted to become a pararescueman: a member of the Air Force troops that rescue downed pilots. But he faced a large obstacle: training to swim. Many of the rescue operations would be over water, so he needed to pass a series of water competency tests.

Growing up, Goggins didn’t have swimming lessons, and he could only do the most basic of strokes. He also had difficulty floating, which made many of the tests, like being able to tread water without moving your arms, difficult. He spent nights full of fear about the next swimming test he’d have to pass. He doubted that he deserved to be there, felt rage toward the people in his cohort for having come from easier circumstances, and worried constantly about failing.

Part-way through his swimming training, the...

Shortform Exercise: Identify Your Discomfort

Examine an activity you don’t like to do to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Describe an everyday activity that you avoid doing, like flossing or taking a walk.

Can't Hurt Me Summary Challenge 4: Best Your Opponent

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 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. Goggins discusses how he developed this technique to survive Hell Week of SEAL training.

Hell Week

Goggins needed to survive grueling training to become a SEAL. During one of the training periods, called Hell Week, the recruits are broken into teams and subjected to hours of physically demanding tasks, such as running miles in the sand, running holding logs or boats overhead, and standing in the cold ocean. Two-thirds of recruits drop out of the program during this week.

Goggins contracted pneumonia in both lungs and needed time to recuperate. By the time he’d recovered enough to resume training, he’d missed enough training that he’d need to start Hell Week from the beginning.

Before entering Hell Week a second time, Goggins realized that he wanted some tools to help him...

Shortform Exercise: Identify Your Opponent

Take stock of an opponent you face and redirect your negative feelings.

Describe a challenge or competitive situation you face.

Can't Hurt Me Summary Challenge 5: Visualize Success

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

Goggins discusses taking a break from SEAL training to recover from an injury and how he used this visualization technique to push through intense physical pain once he returned.

Leaving SEAL Training

In addition to the double pneumonia Goggins developed during his first round of Hell Week, he developed a severe knee injury. Though he wanted to continue training, the injury—a broken kneecap—wasn’t healing quickly enough, so he went home to Indianapolis to recover.

Because it was only an injury, he’d be allowed to return, but he’d be required to do Hell Week training for a third time. And if he survived, he’d need to train for another 6 months to become a SEAL.

While he spent time recovering, he learned that he would be becoming a father with his ex-wife, whom he had recently divorced. He felt unready and unsure of how to meld his life in Indiana with training to become a SEAL in California.

**Though he considered quitting, he thought it would...

Shortform Exercise: Visualize Success

Picture overcoming a challenge to motivate and prepare yourself for achieving your goals.

Write a goal that you’d like to achieve.

Can't Hurt Me Summary Challenge 6: Stock Your Cookie Jar

We often decide to take on challenges while we’re in our comfort zone, but we’re so comfortable, we don’t anticipate obstacles that could arise. To deal with this, we need additional strategies to keep going, even when we face obstacles and want to quit.

Reminding yourself of your previous accomplishments is one way to overcome obstacles. Goggins calls this collection of accomplishments your Cookie Jar.

There’s science behind this strategy. If you get overwhelmed by obstacles, you may forget why you’re doing something and start talking to yourself in a negative way that robs you of energy to keep going. When you feel stressed, your body’s fight or flight system is at work. It’s trying to make a decision about whether to continue with what you’re doing (fight) or abandon it (flight). Focusing on your accomplishments instead of doubtful negative self-talk reminds you of what you’re capable of, giving you the energy to “fight” and keep going.

Goggins developed the cookie jar concept during his experience transitioning from Navy SEAL to ultramarathon runner.

The Road to Badwater 135

In 2005, Goggins learned of the death of nearly an entire team of special operatives in...

Shortform Exercise: Remember Past Victories

Reflect on a past victory you can include in your cookie jar.

List your victories and hardships you’ve overcome.

Can't Hurt Me Summary 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 obstacles that make us want to quit before we’ve given our full effort.

Learning to gently push yourself helps break down your governor while gradually increasing your activity, helping you avoid injury and/or allowing your mind to get accustomed to the new workload.

Goggins learned how to manage his governor as he competed in additional ultramarathons to qualify for the Badwater 135.

Finding Another Race

When Goggins finished the San Diego One Day, he called and emailed the director of the Badwater 135 to share his results from the race. He’d run 101 miles in 18 hours and 56 minutes and thought this was enough to qualify him for Badwater 135.

Instead, Goggins got an email back that the point of a 24-hour ultra race is to run the whole 24 hours, not just the miles...

Can't Hurt Me Summary 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. Doing this challenge will help you make time for working toward your goals.

Goggins’s life got extra busy once he started getting attention for his ultra racing. He learned to compartmentalize his time to work and train.

Becoming a Recruiter

After his success in Badwater 135, Goggins got recruited into doing a race known as the Ultraman—a three-day event consisting of a 6.2-mile swim, 261-mile bike ride, and a double marathon. Despite some difficulties with his bike—he blew out a tire on a downhill—he managed to finish second in the race.

Shortly thereafter, a Navy admiral contacted him. It’s uncommon for the upper leadership in the military to talk with enlisted people, so Goggins worried he’d be reprimanded for drawing undesired attention to the Navy by...

Shortform Exercise: Compartmentalize Your Schedule

Make time to do an activity that’s important to you.

What is an activity that you’d like to make time for in your day, and why?

Can't Hurt Me Summary Challenge 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 combat 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, pushing yourself to go above and beyond rather than settling can help you continuously improve yourself and achieve greatness that distinguishes you from others.

Goggins’s experience attempting to become an Army Ranger and breaking the Guinness World Record for pull-ups demonstrate these principles.

More Training Desired

After Goggins’s SEAL training, he got deployed with a platoon to Malaysia where he realized that he held himself to a higher standard than other SEALS. SEALS are considered elite compared to the rest of the Navy and compared to society in general, but Goggins felt like he desired to push himself, train harder, and earn his keep more than even most SEALS wanted to.

In addition to physical training, Goggins spent his free time studying weaponry and war. In his first evaluation, he got feedback that he should spend some of that time socializing as...

Can't Hurt Me Summary Epilogue: Finding Peace

By age 38, Goggins had accomplished some impressive physical feats, but he started suffering health issues. He worked to find a solution, and later, retired from the Navy and pursued a new career.

Feeling Close to Death

Goggins faced many health issues in the pursuit of new challenges—running on broken legs, a knee injury—yet he always kept pushing himself. Eventually, he couldn’t keep pushing through his pain.

He felt fatigued all the time, no matter what exercise he tried. Doctors ran tests but discovered nothing except slightly suboptimal thyroid levels, which is common for elite athletes. They prescribed him medications that hardly improved his condition.

He wondered if he was close to death, having pushed himself past the point of no return. Yet he didn’t feel regretful; he felt content. All those years, he pushed himself to greatness so that he...