MM#294--Goggins Cookie Jar

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, David Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo man. Hope your New Year's was very, very good and you are often running with your resolutions. Just read a stat that most of us the average American will break their resolutions within the first 32 days. But that's not going to be us, is it? So whatever your resolutions are, I hope you keep them. We're going to do our best to help you keep them. Starting with this Mojo Minute, and, as is our custom, let's go to our first pull quote from the book. Hell Week changed everything for me. It allowed me to have the mindset to sign up for that 24 hour race with less than a week's notice, because during Hell Week you live all the emotions of life, all the highs and lows. In six days and 130 hours you earn decades of wisdom. That's why there's a while there was a schism between the twins. After Marcus went through buds, he gained the kind of self-knowledge that can only come from being broken down to nothing and finding more within. Morgan couldn't speak that language until he endured it for himself. After surviving two Hell Weeks and participating in three, I was a native speaker. Hell Week was home. It was the fairest place I've ever been in this world. There were no timed evolutions, there was nothing graded, there were no trophies. It was an all out war of me against me. And that's where, exactly where I found myself again, when I was reduced to my absolute lowest point, my absolute lowest on hospitality point. His thought was why? Why are you still doing this to yourself, Goggins? Because you are one hard man. I screamed. The voices in my head were so penetrating I had to bite back out loud. I was onto something. I felt an energy build immediately and I realized that still being in the fight was a miracle in and of itself. Except it wasn't a miracle. God didn't come down and bless me. I did this. I kept going when I should have quit five hours ago. I am the reason I still have a chance Now. Remember something else too this wasn't the first time I had taken on a seemingly impossible task. I picked up the pace. I was still walking, but I wasn't sleepwalking anymore and I had life. I kept digging into my past, into my own imaginary cookie jar. And here's the important nugget of wisdom I remembered as a kid no matter how difficult our life was, my mother always figured out a way to stock our cookie jar. She'd buy wafers and Oreos, pepperage farm Milano's and chips ahoy. And whenever she showed up with a new batch of cookies she'd dump them into one jar With her permission. We'd get to go pick one or two out at a time. It was like a mini treasure hunt. I remember the joy of dropping my fist into that jar, wondering what I'd find, and before I crammed the cookie in my mouth, I always took the time to admire it first, especially when we broke in. When we were broke in Brazil, indiana, I turned it around in my hand and I'd say my own little prayer of thanks. The feeling of being that kid locked in the moment of gratitude for the simple gift like a cookie came back to me. I felt it viscerally and I used that concept to stuff A new kind of cookie jar Inside. It were all my past victories, like the time when I had to study three times as hard as anybody else during my senior year in high school just to graduate there was a cookie. Or when I passed the ASVAB test as a senior and then again to get into buds Two more cookies. I remember dropping over a hundred pounds in under three months, conquering my fear of water, graduating buds at the top of my class and being named enlisted honor man in army ranger school. More on that soon. All of those were cookies loaded with chocolate chunks. They weren't mere flashbacks, they weren't just floating through my memory files. I actually tapped into them emotionally, the emotional state I felt during those victories, and in doing so I accessed my sympathetic nervous system once again. My adrenaline took over. The pain started to fade, just enough that I picked up my pace again. I began swinging my arms, lengthening my stride. My fractured feet were still a bloody mess, full of blisters, the toenails peeling off almost every toe, but I kept pounding, and soon it was me who was slaloming runners with pained expressions as I raced the clock. From then on, the cookie jar became a concept I've employed whenever I needed a reminder of who I am and what I'm capable of. We all have a cookie jar inside of us because life, being what it is, has always tested us. Even if you're feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you you can think of a time or two when you overcame the odds and tasted success. It doesn't have to be a big victory either. It can be something small. And that, my friends, is a quote from the great book Can't Hurt Me by the former Navy Seal and Army Ranger and I'll go ahead and say a real life superhero, david Goggins. So let me tell you just a little backstory to this guy. He once held the Guinness Book World Record for completing a mind boggling 4,030 pull-ups in just 17 hours. Can you believe that? I'm not sure I've done 4,000 pull-ups in my whole lifetime. I'm trying to do the math here in my head, public school math in my head, of 10 reps, maybe every other week. All those are assisted reps. Can't count those. All right, regardless. This dude can seriously inspire us. But the key is it was not always this way for Mr Goggins, and this incredible book Can't Hurt Me, which we've covered here before, he takes us on the journey of his transformation from a 297 pound exterminator to a force to be reckoned with, a superhero, if you will. Now, this book is no walk in the park. It's intense, it's gripping and it will push you to your limits. Actually, they came out with a clean addition because the original edition has so much cussing in it that a lot of people were turned off. But when you go to the Amazon reviews, I've never seen a book have 92,000 reviews and they all be five stars. That's for the unclean edition. There's another 10,000 for the clean edition and, yes, still five stars. So this guy is super inspirational. He can teach us something as we launch into the new year with our goals. He teaches us David Goggins does, in fact. He challenges us to tap into our untapped potential to make the most of our lives. He believes we are only using a mere 40% of what we're truly capable of. And one of the strategies he shares with us is called the cookie jar and that's what we opened up with. And, as you heard, david, as a child, went through unimaginable tough times. Childhood was filled with abuse and terror, a lot of racism in the western Indiana in the 80s. But amid the chaos he found Solaston and his mother's cookie jar and every time he picked out a cookie he would savor it and remind himself of the simple pleasures of life. And then he fast-forwards that approach to help him through get through Hell Week, to help him get through his record-breaking attempt at pull-ups which actually he failed at a couple times before finally succeeding were one of these insane ultra-endurance events. And speaking of that, let's go back to the book to find out what one of these endurance events is like. If you set out to mark a course that could crack open a Navy SEAL like a walnut, chew him up and spit him out, san Diego's hospitality point would not make the cut. We're talking about Trainsow Vanilla, its downright serene. Tourists descend year-round for views of San Diego's stunning marina, which spills into Mission Bay. The road is almost entirely smooth, asphalt and perfectly flat, save a brief seven-foot incline, which the pitch of the standard suburban driveway. There are manicured lawns, palm trees, shade trees. Hospitality point is so inviting that disabled and convalescing folks head there with their walkers for an afternoon's rehab stroll all the time. But that day after John Metsch chalked his easy one-mile course, it became the scene of my total destruction. I should have known that a breakdown was coming and, speaking of which, this is called the San Diego One Day. It's an ultramarathon where you run for 24 hours. Going back to the book, by the time I started running at 10 am on November 12, 2005, I hadn't run more than a mile in six months, but it looked like I was fit because I'd never stopped hitting the gym While I was stationed in Iraq on my second deployment with SEAL Team 5. Earlier that year I had gotten back into some serious powerlifting and my only dose of cardio was 20 minutes on the elliptical once a week. The point is, my cardiovascular fitness was an absolute joke and I still thought it was a brilliant idea to try and run 100 miles in 24 hours. Okay, it was always a dumb idea, but I considered it doable because 100 miles in 24 hours demands a pace of just 15 minutes a mile and if it came to it I figured I could walk that fast. Only I didn't walk. When the horn sounded at the start of the race, I took off hot and zoomed in front of the pack Exactly the right move if your race day goal is to blow up. Also, I didn't exactly come in well rested. The night before the race I passed by the SEAL Team 5 gym on my way off base after work and I peeked in, like I always did, just to see who was getting after it and one of his former instructors from his time in training, sbg, which is acronyms probably for someone you know, somebody that they still have to, who's still active duty, so they can't reveal the name SBG was inside warming up and called out Goggans, let's jack some steel. I laughed. He stared me down. You know Goggans. He said, stepping closer, when the Vikings were getting ready to raid a village, they were camped out in the woods in the tents made out of deer hides, sitting around a campfire. Do you think they said, hey, let's have some herbal tea and call it an early night? Or were they more like forget that we're going to go drink some vodka made out of the mushrooms and get all drunk up? So the next morning when they're all hung over and ticked off, they would be in the ideal mood to slaughter some people. Sbg could be a funny guy when he wanted to be. He could see I was wavering and considering my options. On the one hand, the man would always be my buds instructor and he was one of the few instructors who still was still hard putting out and living the seal ethos every day. I always wanted to impress him. Jacking weights the night before the first, my first 100 mile race would definitely impress that crazy son of a gun. Plus, his logic made me crazy, sent made crazy sense to me. I need to get my mind ready to go to war and lifting heavy would be a way of saying bring on all your pain and misery, I'm ready to go. But honestly, who does that the night before running 100 miles? So this dude is a crazy son of a gun. Not sure if you caught that, but the clean edition really does clean it up quite well. So if you want to gather the nuggets of wisdom without all the cussing, I would recommend the clean edition. It's a pretty good translation from the original unclean version, where there's a lot of f bombs and a lot, a lot of cleaning. So what about this San Diego one day? Back to the book Alter running has gone at least somewhat mainstream since then, but in 2005, most ultra races, especially the San Diego one day, was pretty obscure, and it was all new to me when the majority of people think of ultra as they picture trail runs through the remote wilderness and often don't imagine a circuit race where there's some serious runners in the field at this San Diego one day. This was the American National 24 hour championship and athletes descended from all over the country hoping for a trophy and a place on the podium in the modest winter take all cash prize Of $2000. Now, this was not a gilded event basking in a corporate sponsorship, but it was the site for a team comp between the US ultra distance team national team and a team from Japan. Each side fielded teams of four men and four women who we train for 24 hours. One of the top individual athletes in the field was also from Japan. Her name was miss Akagi I'm sorry, miss and Akagi and early on she and I kept pace. Now Goggins race gets extremely harrowing at the 70 mile mark and the 80 mile mark and it's worth just buying the book to read that story. I'm not going to spoil it. The book is worth its weight in gold, especially all the nuggets of wisdom you get. We're going to go back to the book to grab this nugget of wisdom about the cookie jar. I know we all want the whole victory today, but when I was teaching myself to read I would be happy when I could understand every word in a single paragraph. I knew I still had a long way to go to move from a third grade reading level to that of a senior in high school, but even a small win like that was enough to keep me interested in learning and finding more within myself. You don't drop 100 pounds in less than three months without losing five pounds in the first week. The first five pounds I lost were a small accomplishment. It doesn't sound like a lot, but at the time it was proof that I could lose weight and that my goal, however improbable, was not impossible. The engine in a rocket ship does not fire without a small spark first. We all need small sparks, small accomplishments in our lives to fuel the big ones. Think of your small accomplishments as kindling when you want a bonfire. You don't start by lighting a big log. You collect some witch's hair, some small pile of hay or some dry dead grass, you light that and then you add some small sticks and bigger sticks before you feed your tree stump into the blaze, because it's the small sparks which start small fires that eventually build enough to heat and burn the whole forest down. If you don't have big accomplishments to draw on yet, so be it. Your small victories are your cookies to saviour, and make sure you do savor them. Yeah, it was hard on myself when I looked in the accountability mirror by the way, the accountability mirror we talked about last year, we will put a link in the show notes for that mojo minute. But I also praise myself whenever I could claim a small victory, because we all need that A few of us take the time, should take the time, to celebrate our successes. Sure, in the moment we might enjoy them, but do we ever look back on them and feel that win again and again? Maybe that sounds narcissistic to you, but I'm not talking about joining on about the glory days here. I'm not suggesting you bore your friends with all the stories about what a hero you used to be. Nobody wants to hear that. I'm talking about utilizing past successes to fuel you to new and bigger ones. Because in the heat of battle, when life gets real, you need to be able to draw inspiration to push through our own exhaustion, our depression, our pain, our misery. We need to spark a bunch of small fires to become that inferno. And here's our nugget of wisdom. But digging into that cookie jar when things are going south takes focus and determination, because at first the brain doesn't want to go there. It wants to remind you that you're suffering and that your goal is impossible. It wants you to stop so it can stop the pain. That night in San Diego was the most difficult night of my life. Physically. I had never felt so broken. There were no souls to take. I wasn't competing for a trophy. There was no one standing in my way. All I had to draw on to keep myself going was me. The key jar became my energy bank. Whenever that pain got to be too much, I dug into it and took a bite. The pain was never gone, but I only felt it in waves because my brain was otherwise occupied, which allowed me to draw out the simple questions and shrink time. Each lap became a victory lap celebrating a different cookie, another small fire. Mile 81 became 82, and an hour and a half later I was in the 90s. I'd run 90 miles with no training. Who does that? An hour later I was at 95. And after nearly 19 hours of running almost nonstop, I had done it. I'd hit 100 miles, or had I? I couldn't remember. So I just ran one more lap to make sure. After one running 101 miles, my race was finally over. I staggered to my lawn chair. Kate placed a camouflage poncho liner over my body as I shivered in the fog. Steam poured off me. My vision was blurred. I remember feeling something warm down my leg. I looked down and saw I was peeing blood again. I knew what was coming next. The porta potties were about 40 feet away, which may as well have been 40 miles or 4000 miles. I tried to get up but was still too dizzy, collapsed back into the chair. I was in a movable object, but it was much worse this time. My entire backside lower back was speared with warm feces. Kate knew what an emergency looked like. She sprinted to our Toyota Camry and backed the car up to the grassy knoll beside me. My legs were stiff as fossil frozen in stone. I leaned on her to slide in the back seat. She was frantic behind the wheel. It took me directly to the ER, but I wanted to go home. Eventually, they did get to the ER. Eventually, david would recover from his tremendous, tremendous San Diego. One day we're going to read the last paragraph just because he earned it. This last part, going back to the book, this last part, this pain, this suffering this was my trophy ceremony. I had earned this. This was the confirmation that I had mastered my own mind, at least for a little while, and that what I had just accomplished was something special. As I laid there, curled up in the tub, shivering in the fetal position, relishing the pain, I thought of something else too. If I could run 101 miles with zero training. Imagine what I could do with little preparation. So that guy is absolutely crazy, but he is Superman. And on this first mojo minute of 2024, we wanted to inspire you. And speaking of Superman's, what a better way to challenge you and myself to imagine our own cookie jar, our own collection of moments where you were absolutely at your best. Don't recommend eating cookies in 2024, but perhaps we can create our own cookie jar so we can have those collection of moments where we overcame the obstacles, the challenges and the difficult choices and that we can continue to reach for greatness. So your homework today if I can impose some homework on you this first day, first mojo minute of 2024, think of three instances where you were your absolute best self David Goggins style where you absolutely did it. What's your cookie number one, what's your cookie number two and what's your cookie number three? Write those down. Let's begin building and filling that metaphorical cookie jar.

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