if you want to be great you want to be the best [ __ ] ever at what you do you could be misunderstood by everybody because you're going to be so [ __ ] obsessed and so driven to get there that's what it takes that's the truth it takes every second of your [ __ ] life anybody says balance yeah balance is important for a lot of [ __ ] people it is but if you want to [ __ ] go to that edge where people do not like you don't understand you question everything you
[ __ ] do you you've arrived when you are misunderstood to the point where [ __ ] people think you're psycho and you're nuts and you're this and that why are you in the [ __ ] gym at one o'clock in the [ __ ] morning he's got you doing an op for [ __ ] 13 14 hours at the ranger school man at the gym what's wrong you will never understand what is wrong with me oh nobody works like david in this house 13. come on 14 come on they all know me son get
it 18. hold me son get it and that's why i'm so [ __ ] glad you don't because i'm in the right [ __ ] spot when people don't understand you anymore you're in that spot of obsession and drive but people put the [ __ ] around this guy i don't want to talk to you man because you're not going to get it i'm not going to get it boom i want you to get it yeah how much i was born in buffalo my dad was uh almost skating rings and on bars and he was
a very insecure guy he was an alcoholic he uh used to get women for favors so my dad i'm not saying was a pimp i always use a pimp that's how i look at it that's that's my dad he was he was a guy that that didn't care much about anything but himself we had two different sides it was a sign that everybody saw which was a side of this man your dad is so damn cool man he's awesome and we lived on paradise road the second that door was shut in the house it was
game on the real him would come out it was a perfect jekyll and hyde so when you're born into that at a young kid and like you're getting beat for no reason you know like you know i'm not weapons or weapons man but this guy would beat you for no reason just because he was drunk just because he saw you whatever he was a perfect person for psychological warfare the the beatings were horrible but the mind torture was the worst he got so deep in my head as a young kid and that really [ __
] up your foundation you know when when you're born man there's some there's some sensitive years in there man where your brain starts to develop and starts to give you self-esteem courage confidence all those things and my dad was stripping that away from everybody and when you see your mom the worst thing to do is when you see your mom getting beat senseless at a young kid that [ __ ] scars you permanently there was an incident one time when my mom got knocked out on top of the stairs and drug it down the stairs
by her hair and at six years old i never forget this in my mind i was always afraid my whole life i was afraid but i had this [ __ ] voice this this conscience that would always be battling me saying hey you gotta get up and do something i didn't want to do [ __ ] you know like i was just afraid but i would that that voice would force me to get up and my dad you know i try to beat him up whatever at six and i get my ass kicked so it's
been on for several years and i have a big time learning disability and my dad didn't believe in us going to school so my dad it was about the business the skating rink and the bar so this game is open about seven o'clock at night and this is time i was able to walk so about five you know four five six years old eight nine and i go to this you know skating rink at seven o'clock at night and i worked the skating rink until ten at night and then we would scrape the gum off
the floors and we cleaned the whole skating rink up and then my dad at the office and my brother and myself would sleep in the office my mom would go upstairs and work the bar until three o'clock in the morning and then they cleaned the bar up so after all that [ __ ] was done with going to school really happened so when i went to school i was all kind of you know my my learning disability i had social anxiety i was just a jacked up kid from living in this tortured home from the
outside looking in we live in an all-white neighborhood and then we would travel to the ghetto of buffalo new york where the skating rink was at so we you know we worked around mostly blacks and i lived around mostly whites but no one knew what was going on in that house that on 201 paradise road you know it's crazy but um my 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 fourth of july parade so me being one of the few black kids that you know in the area you know it kind of haunts you i had stuff on my notebook you know [ __ ] we're going to kill you on my spanish notebook they had that on my car [ __ ] we're going to kill this early 90s and so 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 i've moved into this area here and it just got worse and worse and worse and it [ __ ] haunted me and that voice that i talked about it kept talking louder and louder and louder but i was doing nothing about it and i decided to make moves and i cheated all through school and copied from the fourth grade to the to my junior year in high school on every assignment and i want to get in the military i want to join the air force and the
guy gave me an asvab test it's like a watered down sat and i couldn't copy on it because the guy beside me had a test a i had test b they got on my right had test c so i looked a copy on this test and i couldn't copy on so i got like a 20 and i wanted to be an air force bear rescue man it's guys that jump on the airplanes and save down pilots it's a it's a special operator in the air force and my score was so horribly low that i retake
it again and he said hey i gotta get 18 the second time even worse i need to get a 50 out of a 99. and so my mom and i for a while we lived in the government subsidized apartments seven dollars a month and also food stamps but um my mom afforded enough money for me to go to see a tutor one one hour a week so for four hours a month i had six months to study for my last test i'm going to take the asthma you know they asked the test three times and
i studied my ass off and passed it i got in the air force and realized there was more things in front of me i was afraid of water to terrify the water and um i learned how to swim but what gets everybody in this training in all special ops training is the water confidence where they try to pretty much drown your ass you know all of our lives we've been breathing and they take that from you and they want to see how comfortable you are in the water and there's only one percent african americans in
special operations and i didn't know anything about african like a lot of them are negative buoyant which i am because the bone density i i struggled but um six weeks into the program there's about 25 guys left out of about 150 i was there and i was never i didn't go to sleep for six weeks of the program and i wanted to quit so badly but i quit everything in my life i copied through school i wanted to prove people wrong and so here i am in this air force program starting to get a little
more confidence but this water was kicking my ass and six weeks in the program the doctor gave me a blood test it was that sickle cell sickle cell trait not the anemia but it still killed people but so they put me out training for a week and when you go from being very uncomfortable in that water situation and then now you're comfortable and i'm sitting back watching the guys drown cause i'm not you know i'm not part of the activities anymore for this week i don't want to get back in that damn water again so
the fear overcame and all my insecurities from my dad from this small town from everything started coming back and even though no one knew how [ __ ] up i was trying to create this other person who was tough i live with this [ __ ] all the time so me not wanting to go back to that water the doctor called me back backup i thought i should get like a like a medical kick out of the military so no quitting for me they'll kick me out so i can have some pride the doctor said
no man you know we could put you back in the training and i was like [ __ ] but after a week i'm like you know what i missed one week there's only three weeks left there's a good chance you know i could tough this [ __ ] out and go on but i went back to the ceo and the commanding officer of the program and the sergeant said hey you gotta start from day one because you missed you know that that week of training and i broke i broke i i i couldn't imagine going
back through that again so i made up a lie and i said man the sickle cell thing is really scaring me it was the [ __ ] water it wasn't sickle cell and and i pretty much quit even though they gave me a medical it would i quit so um from the age of 19 to age of 22 i went and did a job called tag p where you control fast movers behind enemy lines cool job but there's no water i was afraid of water so i avoided it and um i gained 125 pounds in
that time frame i went from 175 to almost 300 to 297 was my heaviest and i started finding things that was comfortable and the more things i found comfortable the more uncomfortable my mind was because that voice i was telling you about it always was there i was just trying to avoid that conscience i i wanted to be left alone from that conscience and it wouldn't leave me alone so i got out of the air force and i started working for a job called eco lab where you spray for cockroaches at 24 and um spraying
that different steak and shakes red lobster whatever from 11 o'clock at night 7 o'clock in the morning and what changed i came home and watched this discovery challenge show um class 224 i came home from steak and shake i sprayed it down last get a big old large 42-ounce shake walk across the street and get a box of mini donuts from 7-eleven and i would drive home for 45 minutes this big old fat guy who yeah i worked out but i was fat i didn't run didn't pt i just hit the gym so i'm driving
home turn the tv on and what comes on discovery channel show and that's where everything changed for me i uh was taking a shower i walked out heard these guys and i watched the show and it made me reflect big time on the piece of [ __ ] that i am and i'm exactly what people said i was gonna be but i was watching these guys going through hell week class 224 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 that my mom for not being there when i was 14 years old my my mom was gonna get remarried to this great guy he got murdered and then i moved back to a small town in brazil and and i everybody was a blind 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 man i got a [ __ ] i i got it no one's gonna [ __ ] come to help me no one's gonna [ __ ] come to help me it's [ __ ] me against me period and um so i had to man up and i said the first thing i started doing is facing every [ __ ] fear i have no matter what the [ __ ] it is man and these things would keep me up and not no one
people who are hearing this [ __ ] they will never really understand and grasp when you face these things and so many things how they keep you up and haunt you at night i had two options to either be that 300 pound guy who's prayed for cockroaches and made a thousand dollars a month and at 24 years old knowing when i'm 50 [ __ ] years old i can reflect on this and think about what guy i never became or i can totally just sack it up and fail and fail and fail until i succeed
so i started calling recruiters up i said i'm gonna be a [ __ ] navy seal and every recruiter so there's a weight and height this is so the weight weight and height limit to get in the military and i was six foot one and 297 and i had prior service which was a big deal so i called all these recruiters up and all of them said hey how tall are you blah blah blah blah they got into conversation and see if i was even qualified and by the time i got to my weight the
phone would hang up pretty much like hey you know what call somebody else you know try to get in the reserves so i tried to get the reserves and i called this guy him steve nostalgia recruiter up he said hey come on in he saw me put me through the weight standard all this sort of stuff and to get into the class i had to get into how to lose 106 pounds in less than three months so i was like [ __ ] that i can't do that i grabbed my chocolate milkshake and went back
to ecolab i'm going back to work man this is my life so in this job you look you know you're looking for cockroaches looking for rodents and stuff like that and this next morning or this next night i went to work and i hit the i don't like cockroaches too much i hit the mother load of cockroaches and this restaurant got full of cockroaches and rodents and everything else and i sat there and said this is my life i said this is my life you are exactly who the [ __ ] this is it and
i said this ain't gonna be it for me so in that restaurant i quit my job left my canister in that restaurant my my spray canister got back in my ecolab truck and i went home and i started working out like somebody i was i became the most obsessed person on the planet earth now i was basically i had to invent a guy that didn't exist i had to invent a guy that can take any pain any suffering any kind of judgment be called [ __ ] be called whatever the [ __ ] in the
world and be able to stand in the [ __ ] room and say go [ __ ] yourself and it built i had to build this callous mind and i built it through suffering i built it through downright [ __ ] just crushing myself if it was raining outside three o'clock in the [ __ ] morning it was snowing the first thing i think is don't go out there and do [ __ ] my instinct was we gotta [ __ ] go out there anything that was [ __ ] horrible in my life that i
would normally say no that was inhumane to most people i had to go do it and i started callous in my mind at this point in my life and i lost the weight i lost the weight and i went back to recruiter i got into that class and i went through three navy still held weeks in one year only gotta ever be in three hell weeks in one year to my knowledge the first one i didn't make it through the next two i did i i didn't stop anymore from there and i started realizing through
this through this process that the [ __ ] mind is what you created and i started opening different doors that i didn't think were even there that anything even existed and the more doors are opened up the more i start realizing that my potential is damn near endless and and it changed my whole mindset so i went from david goggins and i created goggins [Music] that journey is a priceless journey that is hard for me to even explain to people because it sounds so quick and easy that guy's lost this weight and i went through
three hell weeks i went to range of school went to delta for selection whatever it is it was brutal it's a brutal journey every [ __ ] day and everyone's are you happy if anybody knows my life story and i'll try to give you a just a snippet of it where i'm at today is in front of joe rogan telling you my life to get through where i became to get through where i'm at now there's nothing but pride i have for myself that i can't really i can't really show people because i have this
face and this face that they see like are you happy what's wrong with you i'm driven i'm obsessed and that's what you see that's it where does that come from that where did that compulsion that drive it comes from a disgusting place of not being fulfilled in your life of afraid of dying having never accomplished anything i mean a thousand dollars a month this is my life i spray for cockroaches man if if that makes you feel good that's great it didn't make me feel good i wanted to the first time in my life after
26 years as 24 25 wherever i was i wanted to feel good about myself when you really sit back at your life and you in that dark room and you're looking at where you started from and you tell yourself god dawg man my mom is this way my stupid step dad got murdered my dad beat the [ __ ] out of me i can't read and write to say my [ __ ] soul i've lied about it to everybody i've cheated on all these tests my god man and then you put a goal in your
mind how are you gonna feel man when you accomplish this goal coming from that [ __ ] coming from the [ __ ] hell you came from a lot of people start from a good starting point they have a good foundation what if you can surpass all these [ __ ] [Music] so think about this i put everything on david goggins to be a navy seal it's like going to the crap today with with your last thousand dollars and you say you know what i'm gonna put everything on this [ __ ] on black and
hopefully i'll win if now i'm broke i put my whole life a guy that was scared of the [ __ ] water a guy that could [ __ ] tell himself how to read and write on being one of the hardest [ __ ] on the planet think about that [ __ ] a guy that came from nothing i put my whole life and i want to go out here and put everything on david [ __ ] goggles to be a navy seal not to go be a [ __ ] you know boy scout or
some [ __ ] a navy seal and i and i i look at that and i did all this [ __ ] just to get the opportunity to succeed that's what that's what people don't [ __ ] understand man if people see that the end result i remember that guy saying my god man i can't believe what the [ __ ] i've just done i put everything ruin relationships ruin this ruin that put everything on fact i have to become someone in this world or i'm no good for anybody because i was really good about
putting people way above me because i was i wasn't [ __ ] i was never nobody so for me to be on the same stage as these great wannabe navy seals and bus trains like my god you guys are amazing i actually got here with you all thank you so much for allowing me into play but as i was there for so long i got a really good chance to sit back because now the cold waters is water now it's not a cold anymore your mind starts to change they say get in the water most
people think about it for you it became my life so i started learning that if this is my home this is what i am i had to always reset the bar i had to reset my new norm my new norm is you get up every [ __ ] morning at four o'clock and you suffer this is your new norm that became my new [ __ ] life most people want to get out of it i said no [ __ ] this is your new life this is who you are you your new norm is you
wake up and you suffer and i started realizing if that's my mentality this [ __ ] ain't hard anymore you're [ __ ] new normally you wake up you get in the [ __ ] cold water you're gonna be here till the shit's [ __ ] done whenever they say you're out you get out so my new norm so i i do that now today my new norm now is if i'm doing a 20-mile run your new norm now man you [ __ ] are doing 200 [ __ ] miles so at what point during
this buds experience do the instructors start to take notice of you in a in a way that separates you from the pack is it sbg are these guys that are like they're starting to go hey man this this this dude's cut a little bit differently spg noticed it he noticed it in my second hell week because i really and this is no lie i'm i'm very open about my life about this i really started to enjoy the fact of seeing what the human mind was capable of and seeing that what is so horrendous there's so
much joy and glory in this [ __ ] and when you see other alpha males like you know spg in the book um he's a he was one of the hardest i mean one of the hardest guys in the seal teams he's looking at you like the [ __ ] is wrong with you it's about finding energy and strength when you have none there's energy all around us but we think that we have to have it has to come externally a lot of times we have like a tv in front of us watch somebody listen
to a podcast listen to a great music a lot of times in life it's [ __ ] quiet and those are the times when you want to run and hide you gotta be able to find energy you gotta make up games make up tricks make up whatever you can to get to the next evolution of life for me that's why i want to become a navy seal i wanted people to push me outside of my comfort zone every day you know and i thought this was going to be the absolute best platform to do that
these guys the stories i heard after buds it just gets harder buds breaks people down to the point where you don't want to be broken down again like that to me that was exactly the exact starting point for my journey in life that was a starting point for me for a lot of people it's the finish line and i didn't see it that way for me so that's where i started becoming uncommon amongst uncommon people is where i started realizing that you put people on a pedestal that you shouldn't retire chief petty officer dave goggins
is well known for his physical mental toughness and for his practically inhuman level of determination from barely passing his navy seal physical screening test to becoming one of the world's best ultra endurance athletes and the only person to complete navy seal training army ranger school and air force tactical air controller training david routinely pushes his body to the limits ladies and gentlemen it brings a great deal of pleasure to present to you the recipients of the vfw's americanism award retired chief petty officer david goggins [Applause] [Music] first off i'm i'm very humbled to be up
here talking to you all today for a living i'm a motivational speaker and i speak to uh thousands of professional athletes from the biggest names to the smallest names and i saw a doc walking here with the congressional medal of honor this the first time in my life i got nervous to speak in front of a crowd that's how much i respect this man up here i was reading about this man back in the day so i want to thank the vfw very much for giving me this this award it means more than me than
anything i've ever received in my entire life i think my grandfather sergeant jack gardner who is now deceased this would be the happiest day of his entire life i'd like to thank my mom up here who [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] you never picked me up who never picked me up when i fell she taught me how to get up when i was knocked down i think my uncle for always being there for me and i think all you are here who fought in these wars you have no idea how big of a deal this
is to me i was not always this strong guy you see um i went through a lot of hard times in my life to get here today and a story i'll tell you with real quick i tried once to get in the air force to be air force pear rescue and i quit for fear of the water i was 175 pounds i left the air force four years later at 300 pounds i went for 175 300 pounds there's a long story in there on how that came to be but i sat around and read a
book on the medal of honor and those guys all i wanted to be was an uncommon man in my whole life i was not that much worse than that i read stories about men like you doc who had the courage to jump on grenades and stuff like that so i came home one day from working at a job called eco lab where i sprayed for cockroaches made a thousand dollars a month weighing 300 pounds and i got home and i watched the show and discovery channel of guys carrying boats and logs navy seal training i
decided to make a change in my life and i called the recruiter up and he asked me these questions he had to re he had to meet a certain a like a certain height and weight limit i was six foot one and 300 pounds he laughed at me seven other recruiters laughed at me one recruiter finally said come on in i'm too busy to talk to you on the phone he didn't know how much i weighed i walked the recruiter's office and he looked at me and he said you're fat and you're black because i
said i want to be a navy seal i didn't know they'd only been 35 african american navy seals at that time in over 70 years um he said i basically had to lose 106 pounds in less than three months because of my age i was getting too old i came back three months later 106 pounds lighter i uh thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] and literally i spent 18 months going through buds which is a six month program went through three whole weeks that is where i met marcus atrelle danny dietz michael murphy another medal of
honor winner i went through hell week with all these guys real heroes i am not a hero i served with real heroes and from there i went on to raise over two million dollars for a special operations warrior foundation but [Applause] [Music] i'm gonna end you with this right here i have the most respect i can possibly muster up for all of you in this room i know what it takes to be a combat soldier and i used to look for courage i thought courage was a man who won the medal of honor it is
the courage is a man who's willing to put those boots on every single day of his life to go out there and fight for this country where nobody even knows what the hell they're doing or where the hell they're at you do for the man beside you thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] what do you think people most misunderstand about your story i'm not happy i'm uh one the biggest thing is they say look at his eyes look at his eyes man have you seen his eyes look he has demons in his eyes he looks so
unhappy i'm like there's a lot of projection you know and i i see some of this [ __ ] i think that the biggest thing is i'm not happy i'm not i'm not fulfilled you know all this [ __ ] they're so missing the point man what they see in me is a very focused driven human being who found a buried [ __ ] treasure within himself not many people found it [Music] so the journey i'm on is very different than most people it's why i don't judge people i say that many times i don't
judge people i'm judged a lot by how i look my eyes my my not smiling all the time not laughing not joking and that's the big i'm a funny [ __ ] big time but guess what right now it's easy to be happy it's easy to smile those are the good times the good times those times don't need to be trained you know how to train myself for good times those times for most people don't need to be trained what i'm trying to give you all is the misery of sometimes we go through in life
those are times we don't want to [ __ ] talk about we want to skip forward to peace let's just [ __ ] [ __ ] all this let's skip all this pain and suffering and misery of real life let's let's cover it over nice big blanket and let's find peace no sorry it's not possible yeah go into that [ __ ] hell hole of life that you have that [ __ ] you up and fix it and that's what i'm here to do you gotta go to war with yourself before there's peace that's what
i say in the book you say in the book you must go to war yourself before you find peace so i'm trying to give you tools on how to do that and i'm not considering a smile and be happy about it it's a hard journey it's a real journey it's a it's a journey that's gonna take you way outside of being comfortable you know all these fires are happening here in california man so it's so tragic what happened out here but those fires start by a little motivation and this is what i'm looking at man
it's like a like a little spark starts these big fires it was so crazy that's why i look at motivation motivation just a spark but those little sparks if somebody comes by real quick with some water that fires down this out but if you come by and that little fire no one touches it and that little fire which is motivation which is kindling and that kindling grows off to like they call it one hour fuels two hour fuels ten hour fuels ten thousand dollar fuels you want that thing to boil over and catch a nice
big log it's gonna burn a long time and that big lawn starts catching everything on fire this is your soul so motivation a lot of times can be [ __ ] just put some water on it puts it out that motivation needs to turn into drive passion obsession to what you want to become and once you come obsession or driven it's a [ __ ] inferno so now you gotta call in tons of firefighters and call in for help for here calling for help from there and they're not putting that [ __ ] out only
they can take that thing out it's gotta burn itself out you know the one gift i have with all that being said what you just said there is i have the ability to see the end before the beginning even begins and what that means is i know that to get to the very end i can see it right now so before i went to butts and i was losing all the [ __ ] weight and [ __ ] i saw myself walking across the [ __ ] stage at 191 [ __ ] pounds that's what
i had to get to to get into the door i saw myself six months a year later whatever's gonna take me to do i saw myself walking across that stage getting that [ __ ] certificate of graduation from buds and i was able to be there at 300 [ __ ] pounds and that feeling that i was nowhere near that [ __ ] feeling i was able to put myself there a million times every [ __ ] day that feeling of like my god that is going to feel [ __ ] amazing that's what made
me suffer that's what allowed the pain to be real and say this is worth it i want to feel for this [ __ ] next 18 months it took me 18 [ __ ] months to finally become a navy to finally you know just get through butts that's what woke me up every [ __ ] morning was i'm gonna put myself through this much [ __ ] pain and suffering for a few seconds that's all it is a few seconds of joy is so [ __ ] worth it man very few ever get to where
you are today you only graduate from buds training once it marks the completion of the toughest military training in the world in a society where mediocrity is too often the standard and too often rewarded there is intense fascination with men who detest mediocrity who refuse to define themselves in conventional terms and who seek to transcend traditionally recognized human capabilities this is exactly the type of person buds is meant to find the man who will find a way to complete each and every task to the best of his ability the man who will adapt and overcome
any and all obstacles the only thing gets me mad nowadays is that so many people die with untapped potential because they think that someone else is [ __ ] better than them and they were born you know not with the greatest tools you don't need [ __ ] you need the ability to [ __ ] grind your ass into a fine [ __ ] powder i mean that fire powder find a way to build that [ __ ] back up repeatedly and it's possible [Music] [Music] you