What one Navy SEAL learned by doing Hell Week 3 times | David Goggins | Big Think

[Music] The first few weeks you get your butt kicked in SEAL training. I got to Hell Week. Hell Week's 130 hours of continuous training. You might get two hours of sleep. In my first Hell Week, early on, I got injured. I got rolled back to day one, week one. I started up again. I went through that complete Hell Week.

After that Hell Week, or during that whole week, I actually broke my knee. So I got through Hell Week with a broken knee, and after that, I kept on running on it. I kept on running, kept on doing things; I couldn't move it. So I got rolled back again and had to start back day one, week one again. This time, they said to me, "You're only going to get one more chance to go through, no matter if you get injured, no matter what happens, only one more chance."

So I had stress fractures, shin splints. I had several injuries; I had a broken rib. I had several injuries starting my third Hell Week. But through this period of time, I was developing this thing called my own personal cookie jar—things I went through in my life that I overcame, whether they be positive things, negative things, whatever it was, I was still here. I was overcoming them, and I used this cookie jar for me to get through my third and last time going through Navy SEAL training.

So when things got hard for me, I was able to go in my mental cookie jar and remember, "Hey, I survived what my dad did to me. Hey, I survived what the kids at school did to me." Because what happens is, in Hell Week, in SEAL training, they want to make you panicked. They want to put you in a situation of stress. They want you to question your very motives of being in SEAL training. They want to question, "Why are you here?" They want to put you in a dark spot that makes you question your own sanity.

And they do that very well. If you don't have the proper tools, like the proper tools, you're going to quit. And in that one second, you make the worst decision of your life because you cannot calm yourself down. And in that one second, what happens is you start to think very negatively. Your mind will always choose the path of least resistance. We put so much stuff in our brain; our brain gets overloaded. So it wants to choose a path of least resistance.

We have to train our minds to choose the path of most resistance. And so what I did was I realized through my whole life that in that one second, I had nothing to control. I had no end result; I had no feeling of victory to kind of pull from. In this one second, so I would quit things. I would give up, and the dialogue in my head in that one second would be very negative.

I had to find why I wanted to be here. If you find out why you want to be somewhere when you're in that situation of wanting to quit, what happens is the questions that come to you are the proper questions: "How can I get through this? How can I make this work for me?" If you don't have the proper purpose on why you're somewhere, the questions that come to your mind are, "We shouldn't be here. This is dumb. The water's too cold. I can go home and have a good meal. I shouldn't be subjecting myself to this kind of torture."

But when you find out in life why you want to be somewhere, the questions are more of, "How can I get through this?" versus "Why am I here?" "How can I?" versus "Why?" So my dialogue was proper; I had the cookie jar. I was able to go through and wake myself up. Because even the hardest people in the world, they forget who they are when times get bad.

That mental cookie jar is where you can go through and kind of remind yourself, "Okay, I went through three Hell Weeks. I was in two Hell Weeks. I got through them. I got through this. I got through that." Some of those bad times, you remind yourself versus panicking and quitting. So I learned all these different kind of mind games because that's all life is—one big game. It's one big game you have to learn and have control over your own thoughts.

If you can't control your own thoughts and you have negative thoughts in there, you have to make a negative a positive to get through everything in life. And I started to learn how to do this versus making a negative a negative. I made a negative a positive. I got through SEAL training; I got through that. Went on to be even more than that. SEAL training wasn't enough; Navy SEALs weren't enough. I wanted to find more and more and more because I discovered another spot in my mind that I realized I could do anything I set my mind to. I went on to go start, you know, I started running. I started doing these different pull-up records, started continuing to go further and further and further to see what the limits were.

I realized people don't have limits; we put limits on ourselves. And that's why, you know, that's why I created for myself. [Music] You.