David Goggins - Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within

T his is not a self - help book. Nobody needs another sermon about the ten steps or seven stages or sixteen hours a week that will deliver them from their stalled or fucked - up life. Hit the local bookstore or surf Amazon and you will slip into a bottomless pit of self - help hype. Must feel good to consume because it sure does s ell.

Too bad most of it wont work. Not for real. Not forever. You might see progress here and there, but if you are broken like I used to be or stuck wandering an endless plateau while your true potential wastes away, books alone cant and wont fix you.

Self - help is a fancy term for self - improvement , and while we should always strive to be better, improvement is often not enough. There are times in life when we become so disconnected from ourselves that we must drill down and rewire those cut connections in our hearts, minds, and souls. Because that is the only way to rediscover and reignite belief that flicker in the darkness with the power to spark your evolut ion.

Belief is a gritty, potent, primordial force. In the 1950s, a scientist named Dr. Curt Richter proved this when he gathered dozens of rats and dropped them into thirty - inch - deep glass cylinders filled with water. The first rat paddled on the surface for a short time, then swam to the bottom, where it looked for an escape hatch. It died within two minutes. Several others followed that same pattern. Some lasted as long as fifteen minutes, but they all gave up. Richter was surprised because rats are damn good swimmers, yet in his lab, they drowned without much of a fight. So, he tweaked the t est.

After he placed the next batch in their jars, Richter watched them, and right before it looked like they were about to give up, he and his techs scooped up the rats, toweled them off, and held them long enough for their heart and respiratory rates to normalize. Long enough for them to register, on a physiological scale, that they had been saved. They did this a few times before Richter placed a group of them back into those evil cylinders again to see how long they would last on their own. This time, the rats didnt give up. They swam their natural asses offfor an average of sixty hours without any food or rest. One swam for eighty - one ho urs.

In his report, Richter suggested that the first round of subjects gave up because they were hopeless and that the second batch persisted for so long because they knew it was possible someone would come along and save their sorry asses. The popular analysis these days is that Richters interventions flipped a switch in the rat brain, which illuminated the power of hope for us all to see.

I love this experiment, but hope isnt what got into those rats. How long does hope really last? It may have triggered something initially, but no creature is going to swim for their life for sixty hours straight, without food, powered by hope alone. They needed something a lot stronger to keep them breathing, kicking, and fight ing.

When mountaineers tackle the tallest peaks and steepest faces, they are usually tethered to a rope fixed to anchors in the ice or rock so when they slip, they dont slide off the mountain and tumble to their deaths. They may fall ten or twelve feet, then get up, dust themselves off, and try again. Life is the mountain we are all climbing, but hope is not an anchor point. Its too soft, fluffy, and fleeting. Theres no substance behind hope. Its not a muscle you can develop, and its not rooted down deep. Its an emotion that comes and g oes.

Richter touched something in his rats that was damn near unbreakable. He may not have noticed them adapting to their life - or - death trial, but they had to have figured out a more efficient technique to preserve energy. With each passing minute, they became more and more resilient until they started to believe that they would survive. Their confidence didnt fade as the hours piled up; it actually grew. They werent hoping to be saved. They refused to die! The way I see it, belief is what turned ordinary lab rats into marine mamm als.

There are two levels to belief. Theres the surface level, which our coaches, teachers, therapists, and parents love to preach. Believe in yourself, they all say, as if the thought alone can keep us afloat when the odds are against us in the battle of our lives. But once exhaustion sets in, doubt and insecurity tend to penetrate and dissipate that flimsy brand of bel ief.

Then theres the belief born in resilience. It comes from working your way through layers of pain, fatigue, and reason, and ignoring the ever - present temptation to quit until you strike a source of fuel you didnt even know existed. One that eliminates all doubt, makes you certain of your strength and the fact that eventually, you will prevail, so long as you keep moving forward. That is the level of belief that can defy the expectations of scientists and change everything. Its not an emotion to be shared or an intellectual concept, and nobody else can give it to you. It must bubble up from wit hin.

When you are lost at sea and no one is coming to save you, there are only two options. You will either swim hard and figure out how to last as long as it takes, or you are bound to drown. I was born with holes in my heart and sickle cell trait, and into a childhood torched by toxic stress and learning disabilities. I had minimal potential, and by the time I turned twenty - four , I knew I was in danger of wasting my l ife.

Many people get it twisted and think my accomplishments directly correlate to my potential. My accomplishments do not equate to my potential. The little bit I had was buried so deep, most people would never have found it. Not only did I find it, I learned to maximize it.

I knew that there could be so much more to my story than the wreckage I saw around me, and that it was time to decide if I had it in me to go as hard as I could for as long as it took to become a more self - empowered human being. I fought through doubt and insecurity. I wanted to quit every single day, but eventually, belief kicked in. I believed I could evolve, and that same belief has given me the strength and focus to persevere whenever Ive been challenged for over two decades. More often than not, Ive challenged myself to see how far I can push it and how many more chapters I can add to my story. Im still seeking new territory, still curious just how high I might rise from the bottom of the bar rel.