Developing a calloused mind
When you create mental friction by going against your minds constant need for comfort and thrust yourself into intense physical and intellectual challenges, you gradually callus over your fear of discomfort and increase your pain tolerance in a way life is like boxing.
The first time you get punched in the chin, it hurts like hell, but if you keep putting yourself in the ring after a few years, you’ll have developed the mental tolerance to absorb a hundred punches from stronger opponents.
“After you callus your mind, you learn you can take a hell of a lot more than one punch”
To start callusing your mind, you need to start craving discomfort, every day look for opportunities to make yourself uncomfortable if it starts raining outside, go for a run, if you’ve had a long day at work, go to the gym and do the hardest workout you’ve done all month. If you don’t feel like studying, lock yourself in a quiet room and don’t leave that room until you’ve written ten page of notes.
By craving discomfort and seeking out painful but rewarding experiences, you’re not trying to be a masochist (受虐狂）You’re simply trying to master your fear of pain.
When Goggins was in his early 20s, his fear of pain and pursuit of comfort led him to a dead-end job sprang cockroaches and rewarding himself with large chocolate shakes in a box of hostess mini donuts after every shift.
Soon he weighted 290 pounds and felt too ashamed to look at himself in the mirror. By avoiding pain, his internal pain grew and grew.
When Goggins started pursuing pain by taking on chanlleges that would cause him to suffer, like losing a hundred pounds in three months to qualify for Navy SEAL training, he reduced his internal pain and his fear of pain and put himself back in the driver’s seat of his life.
When you seek got painful but rewarding experiences. It’s helpful to remember the secret of pain
A secret that most people never realize or simply forget the secret of pain is that
When you fear the experience of pain, it grows
But when you accept pain, it shrinks.
Your experence of pain changes relative to how your react to it.
If you fee from it, pain pursues you like a monster in a dream
If you confront the monster it goes away
If you getting the habit of walking towards pain, you’ll gradually callus your mind and blunt your fear of discomfort but regardless of how much you callus your mind you’re bound to experience moments when pain seems unbearable and you think you’ve reached your absolute limit, you might get this feeling after weeks of working on project for 12 hours a day or mile 15 of a marathon .
In these moments Duggan says it’s critical to remember the 40 percent rule and use your cookie jar, when Goggins would get to the hundred mile mark in a 200-mile race and feel completely exhausted, he remember the 40 percent rule and know that he had the capacity to run another hundred miles if he simply stopped listening to the excuses his mind was feeding him.
The 40 percent rule states that when you mind first tells you you’re done, you’re only 40 percent done, if you look deep within yourself, you’ll find that you haven’t even tapped into half of what you’re capable of
As crazy as the forty percent rule sound, scientists can actually back it up.
It turned out that the urge to quit wasn’t due to muscle failure, it was due to an over protective brain telling the body to stop.
Fatigue should no longer be considered a physical event but rather a sensation or a motion.
The next time you feel completely exhausted and your brain is convincing you to quit, remember that the first sign of exhaustion is usually a false one.
Know that you have a large reserve of energy that you haven’t tapped into yet, dig deep, find your 60% reserve and tap into it 5% a time.
When you’re doing push-ups and your brain starts complaining. Remember the 40% rule and squeeze out one more set another then another then another.
Cookie represents a time in our life when we faced intense struggle overcame the odds and tasted success maybe it was overcoming a speech impediment or getting through college or dropping a bad habit like smoking.
Cookie doesn’t need to be large if you turned off you phone to study for 30mins, that is cookie
Remember you have been to difficulty before and I’ve always survived to fight again shifts the conversaion in your head, it allows you to control and manage doubt and keep you focused on taking each and every step necessary to achieve the task at hand.
Just remember when the pain hits and tries to stop you short of your goal, dump your fist in pull out a cookie and let it fuel you.
If you want to find David Goggins level grit, start by doing something that sucks everyday to Callus your fear of discomfort when the pain becomes unbearable and you encounter your first urge to quit remember the 40% rule and dip into your cookie jar to find the energy you need to push on and push through you mental barriers
As Goggin says:” If you want to master you mind, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work because passion and obsession even talent are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up”