Recently, I published part one of this series. (See the "Resources" section below for the link.)

Huberman Lab

In part 2 (this post), I'm drawing on conversations between David Goggins and Andrew Huberman of Huberman Lab.

“Everything I do in life sucks. Everything I do is hard. I didn't have some epiphany when I was twenty-four and three hundred pounds. No. I knew my life was going to be a struggle. I just ignored it …
I was the lowest form on Earth; no talent, no ability to learn and I literally know what it is to be [at] rock bottom and to build that up, so that question about learning, it's a pain in my ass and I don't have to do it. I'm forty-nine years old and a multimilionaire. I don't have to do anything. […] How I do every day, it's a discipline, it's a regimen. It was a choice I made. the choice was "what are you willing to sacrifice and what are you willing to give up to find every bit of who you are as a human being?" I was willing to give everything to do that.”

Learning with ADHD

• If you're having trouble with absorbing information from an educational textbook or video, go over it multiple times and write notes for yourself that you refer back to. If you can, try to teach the topic to someone else whom knows nothing about it, then ask them to quiz you on it.
• Learn the bulk of what you need to, over and over until it sticks, then go back and learn the small details. Do this every single day.
• Everything you do should be done with total focus at that point. That takes training through repetition.
• Don't feel sorry for yourself or have a pity party because you're different or have a disability. It doesn't do you any good in the long run and is a waste of your energy.
• People don't want to go through the process of suffering, of learning how to focus, of teaching themselves new skills, so they give up and fail. Don't give up, don't quit.
• Nothing is easy for everyone. Everything worth pursuing is hard. You don't just wake up and do stuff without effort. For other people, life might seem easy, but that's because they've practiced enough to get through the suck. Every day, you've got to push yourself to be the best human being you can be.
• You have a choice to make, between continuing to be as you are and being better at whatever it is that you find difficult and/or daunting.
• If you want to be great at what you do, don't aim to maximise money or social relationships. Focus on maximising your tangible skills until they're strengths.
• Encountering friction is a sign of growth. It's something to surpass.
• If you're not using all of what you have, only the bare minimum of your potential, you fail to grasp both how great you are and how great you can be.
• You have to commit everything you've got, every day. It's a choice you have to make. Otherwise, you'll never achieve greatness, but waste your life. Nobody's going to do it for you.
• You have to have a conqueror's mindset in order to get through the hard things.

Haunted by Past Inadequacies

• No matter how much you improve, no matter how much better you are, it's not permanent. You've got to keep working on yourself, even when you feel yourself at the end of your tether. You have to make that choice, over and over.
• Stay away from social media. It's poisonous for your sense of self and self worth. People who don't understand you and what you put yourself through will try to pick you apart because they're envious of what you've achieved and what you will achieve when they know they never will.
• People love to show your their successes and hide the suck, the friction. The reality is that life is hard for all of us, just in different ways. Few people, if any, show you that.
• The only way you fix yourself is by being vulnerable, by taking an honest look at your shortcomings and weaknesses and deciding what you're going to do about them.
• Write yourself a list to live by, one that includes all the things you have/want to do in order to achieve something great, then set about doing it every day.
• Forget about having passion and motivation, because you're probably not going to have those when you're grinding through the days, working on yourself and pushing towards the next milestone you've set for yourself. Those things are luxuries that might come with time, but probably not.
• You just have to do what you fucking have to do and it's going to suck majorly. Likely as not, you'll have no passion or motivation for it.
• Motivation is bullshit; just get on and do it.
• How do you want to live and how do you want to be remembered? What do you want to achieve in/with your life? That's all you need.

Stay Hard: All stick and gas pedal (no carrot)

“Hard work looks horrible. It's not motivating. It's not motivating at all. […] It looks like a man being stuck in a fucking dungeon and there's no way out.”

• There is no carrot for David Goggins (and there never has been one).
• You know exactly what you have to do. The problem is that you can't make yourself do it, because doing it really sucks and you'd rather not.
• Stuff isn't "just there" and done. It has to be done over and over, until it becomes easier (and sometimes it doesn't).
• You have to outwork and conquer the negative self talk and self doubt.
• When you're not naturally gifted/talented, you have to stay hard and work at it. There's no magic pill, potion or silver bullet that's going to help you.
• It takes a great deal of discipline that's difficult to describe or put down in words. Everybody has the ability to cultivate it, but few want to, because it's difficult and it sucks.
• Your greatness is within you, but it's up to you to pull it out and nurture it. It's a choice you have to make.

Willpower and the Mid-Cingulate Cortex

“Most people are missing something because they don't know who they are. They've never examined themselves.”

• Doing something you don't want to do, but do anyway, grows an area of the brain known as the mid-cingulate cortex, the seat of willpower.
• Doing something that you do want to do has no effect on the mid-cingulate cortex.
• If you don't do something you don't want to do every day, that causes the mid-cingulate cortex to shrink.
• Willpower is something that gets built. It's something that you have to develop, every day, over the course of years to decades.
• When something in life sucks really badly, very few people want to go back and relive the experience; they're happy that it is behind them. However, going back and reliving it can make you stronger.
• Repeating the hard things is how you strengthen your willpower. At some point, it becomes a habit.
• You create your own self (self actualise). Everyone has a lot of potential that hasn't been unlocked. It's all chained up because people haven't worked on strengthening their willpower, because doing so is scary.
• Everything you think/tell yourself you can't do is a limitation you place on yourself, a chain around your potential.
• Any problem you have with yourself is one of yourself not wanting to fix it.
• Most people are not super successful, but they're "good enough" for themselves. They don't want to be better badly enough to push themselves to greater heights. That's how they grow complacent and soft.
• People don't want to do the things that build willpower precisely because those things are scary and the human brain does its best to protect us from things that are dangerous or scary.
• A lot of people don't want to go on the journey of self-discovery, because it's a painful and scary one. It definitely isn't pretty.

### No Days Off

“A lot of people are haunted, but they keep watching the same horror film. […] I don't like horror films, so I changed it.”

• If every day you wake up and you're happy with who and where you are in life, none of this is for you.
• What builds greatness is starting with what's small and manageable, then iterating on that every day, without fail.
• While you still can do something, do it. The second you stop, you lose a little bit of willpower.
• It (living a life like Goggins does) requires constant and disciplined upkeep.
• Listening to David Goggins (or reading this post) is the easy part. Actually remembering it and applying it, actually doing the work every damn day for the rest of your life, is the hard part.
• If you don't have even a little flame of willpower, you're done for. Nobody and no book or seminar can give it to you.
• Something in you has to be active or activated so that you make a better life for yourself. That comes from within.
• There's no happiness, peace or motivation behind it. It sucks and it's going to continue to suck. It just fucking sucks. You have to build the willpower to go through it and come out the other side, accomplished and successful. Then you go through it all over again.
• If you grok that one thing and carry on anyway, you've got it made, no matter what you do.
• If you're not strong mentally, you're going to keep falling back into the same hole and it's a vicious circle.
• You have to envision yourself being more powerful than what you currently are and hold that in your mind so that you endure through all the suck. That way, it doesn't matter that life sucks.