Never Finished

Copyright © 2022 Goggins Built Not Born, LLC All rights reserved. First Edition ISBN: 978-1-5445-3681-1 ]> To my North Star that has always shined, even on the darkest of nights. ]> Contents Warning Order Introduction 1. Maximize Minimal Potential Evolution No. 1 2. Merry Christmas Evolution No. 2 3. The Mental Lab Evolution No. 3 4. A Savage Reborn Evolution No. 4 5. Disciple of Discipline Evolution No. 5 6. The Art of Getting Hit in the Mouth Evolution No. 6 7. The Reckoning Evolution No. 7 8. Play until the Whistle Evolution No. 8 9. Wringing Out the Soul Acknowledgments ]> WARNING ORDER TIME ZONE: 24/7 TASK ORGANIZATION: SOLO MISSION SITUATION: Your horizons have been limited by societal and self-imposed barriers.MISSION: Fight through resistance. Seek unknown territory. Redefine what’s possible.EXECUTION: Read this book cover to cover. Absorb the philosophy within. Test all theories to the best of your ability. Repeat. Repetition will sharpen new skills and stimulate growth.This will not be easy. To succeed, you will be required to face hard truths and challenge yourself like never before. This mission is about embracing and learning the lessons from each and every Evolution so you can discover who you really are and can become.Self-mastery is an unending process. Your job is NEVER FINISHED! CLASSIFIED: The real work is unseen. Your performance matters most when nobody is watching. BY COMMAND OF: DAVID GOGGINS SIGNED: RANK AND SERVICE: CHIEF, U.S. NAVY SEALS, RETIRED ]> Introduction This 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 jacked-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 sell. Too bad most of it won’t 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 can’t and won’t 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 evolution. 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 good swimmers, yet in his lab, they drowned without much of a fight. So, he tweaked the test. 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 didn’t give up. They swam their hearts out…for an average of sixty hours without any food or rest. One swam for eighty-one hours. 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 them. The popular analysis these days is that Richter’s 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 isn’t 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 fighting. 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 don’t 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. It’s too soft, fluffy, and fleeting. There’s no substance behind hope. It’s not a muscle you can develop, and it’s not rooted down deep. It’s an emotion that comes and goes. Richter touched something in his rats that was nearly 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 didn’t fade as the hours piled up; it actually grew. They weren’t hoping to be saved. They refused to die! The way I see it, belief is what turned ordinary lab rats into marine mammals. There are two levels to belief. There’s 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