You’re in danger of living in a life that is so soft and comfortable that you will never realize your true potential.
We all make habitual, self-limiting choices. We all take the path of least resistance. It’s as natural as sunset and as fundamental as gravity. It’s how our brains are wired.
It’s okay to be cruel to yourself as long as you realize you’re doing it to become better.
“I brainwashed myself into craving discomfort. If it was raining, I would go run. Whether it started snowing, my mind would say, Get your fucking shoes on. Sometimes I wussed out and had to deal with it at the Accountability Mirror.”
Not all physical and mental limitations are real.
“I had to choose between physical suffering in the moment, and the mental anguish of wondering if that one missed pull-up, that last lap in the pool, the quarter mile I skipped on the road or trail, would end up costing me an opportunity of a lifetime.”
Everything in life is a mind game.
“Do you hammer hard and snag that personal best like you said you would, or do you crumble? That decision rarely comes down to physical ability, it’s almost always a test of how well you’re managing your own mind”.
Everyone’s motivated when things are going their way.
“It’s important to push hardest when you want to quit because it helps callous your mind. It’s the same reason why you must do your best work when you’re least motivated.”
Start by painting a picture of what your success looks and feels like.
“I’ll think about it every day and that feeling propels me forward when I’m training, competing or taking on any task I choose. Why are you doing this? What’s driving you toward this achievement? What has calloused your mind?”
Don’t take in what someone else felt.
Feel what you feel. Make that be your reality. Don’t let their reality be your reality. Life is one big mind game and usually you’re planning against yourself.
It’s literally fighting each second in its own battle.
You just stay in one second after one second after another, stringing it altogether.
The more you think about yourself while you’re going through hell, the harder hells going to be.
The second you start looking after everybody else, you no longer think about yourself and trapped in your own thoughts.
Hardships callouses your mind.
When you first go to gym, your palms are soft and quickly get torn up by the bars because they aren’t accustomed to gripping to steel. But overtime, after thousands of reps, your palms build up thick callouses of protection. The same principle works for your mindset. Until you experience hardships like failures and disappointments, your mind remains soft and exposed. Life experience especially negative experience helps callouses your mind.
But it’s up to you where that callouses lines up.
If you choose to see yourself as a victim of circumstances into your adulthood, that callouses will become resentment that protects you from unfamiliar. It will make you too cautious, untrusting and possibly too angry at the world. It will make you fearful of change and hard to reach.
Don’t put a tittle on someone else to make yourself feel better.
Doing so doesn’t give you get-out-of-fail-free card.
We focus on the one small thing we don’t have.
We can have great life, great wife, great husband, beautiful home, all that stuff. But if you have one small thing in your life that isn’t so great, that’s what you going to focus on.
Everyone fails sometimes and life isn’t supposed to be fair.
Luck won’t always go your way, so you can’t get trapped in the idea that you somehow deserve it. Your entitled mind is dead-weight. Cut it loose. Don’t focus on what you think you deserve. Take aim on what you’re willing to earn.
The only way you’re going to become hard and learn to callouses your mind is you must do the thing you do not want to do. There’s no way around it, like if you want to be good at running, you just must keep on running. If you’re trying to get the advantage, you must do the things that make you say oh I really don’t want to do that shit right now. – David Goggins