Navy SEAL has a '40 Percent Rule' and it's the key to overcoming mental barriers | Big Think

I first met SEAL at a 100-mile run in San Diego, and I was running this race as part of a six-person relay team with friends, and he was running the entire race by himself. And the run was unsupported, so you have to bring your own supplies. So we had, you know, we overdid it a little bit. We had a tent, and we had masseuses and food. I mean, we were ready for like in case we had to stay there a week. And he had a folding chair, a bottle of water, and a bag of crackers. And I just thought to myself, like, who is this guy? I’ve never seen anything like it.

And during the race, I kept an eye on him, and around mile 70, he weighed probably 260 pounds, which is quite large for an ultra runner. He had broken all the small bones in both of his feet and had kidney damage, and he finished the race. So when it was done, I Googled him. He had a fascinating life story, and I decided literally to cold call him. And I flew out and met with him, and after sitting with him for a couple of minutes, I realized that I could learn so much from a guy like this; that what makes him tick and various buckets in my life would be so much better if a little bit of what he had rubbed off on me.

I asked him to come live with my family and me for a month. So at the time that I invited SEAL to come live with us, I had an 18-month-old son. I was married; still am. Two more kids since. And I had sold a couple of businesses. I was in a great place professionally in my life, but I was also in a routine. And routines are great, but they can also be a rut. And I found that I just wasn’t getting better. I was doing the same thing every day, like so many of us. Wake up, go to work, come home, you know, have dinner, repeat. And I just wanted to get off autopilot. And I thought that he would be a great way to get in good shape, but also to just mix up my routine and get better.

The first day that SEAL came to live with me, he asked me to do—he said, “How many pull-ups can you do?” And I’m not great at pull-ups. I did about eight—just getting over the bar eight. And he said, “All right. Take 30 seconds and do it again.” So 30 seconds later, I got up on the bar, and I did six, struggling. And he said, “All right, one more time.” We waited 30 seconds, and I barely got three or four, and I was done. I mean, I couldn’t move my arms, done. And he said, “All right. We’re not leaving here until you do 100 more.”

And I thought there’s no—well, we’re going to be here for quite a long time because there’s no way that I could do 100. But I ended up doing it one at a time, and he showed me, proved to me right there that there was so much more; we’re all capable of so much more than we think we are. And it was just a great lesson. It was actually the first thing that we did. It was just a great lesson that we have so much more in our reserve tank than we think we do.

One of the things that SEAL said to me, and it’s in the book, and one thing that people have said that really resonated with them, he would say that when your mind is telling you you’re done, you’re really only 40 percent done. And he had a motto: “If it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.” And that was his way of every day forcing us to get uncomfortable, to figure out what our baseline was and what our comfort level was, and just turning it upside down.

The 40 percent rule—maybe it’s give or take a little, but look at a marathon. Most people hit the wall in a marathon at mile anywhere from 16 to 20. And, you know, 99 percent of the people in this country that run marathons finish, and they all, predominantly all of them go through this hit the wall. So where does that extra 50 or 60 percent, or whatever the number is, come from? I mean, it’s their brain saying, “I’m done, I don’t want to continue,” but their will saying, “You know what? Let me get to the finish line.”

So we all have that will. It’s just a matter of how do we apply it to not just with the once-a-year marathon but to our daily lives to make it apply to a variety of things...