If you’re a fan of self-improvement, you know the name David Goggins.
Navy Seal. Ultramarathon runner. Long-distance cyclist. Author. Public speaker. Goggins is a man ho has garnered a reputation as one of the mentally toughest people on the planet.
Despite being every bit as human as we are, he’s found a way to tap into his potential in a way that very few ever do.
In this article, we’ll be covering an extensive list of David Goggins quotes that will fire you up and provide insight into the way that he approaches life.
Motivational David Goggins Quotes
Let’s kick off this list of badass quotes with some of David Goggins’ best motivational quotes.
- “If you can get through doing things that you hate to do, on the other side is greatness.”
- “Suffering is a test. That’s all it is. Suffering is the true test of life.”
- “I don’t stop when I’m tired, I stop when I’m done.”
- “You address pain by facing it. You face it every day. You face it every single day of your life.”
- “Be uncommon amongst uncommon people.”
- “It’s time to go to war with yourself.”
- “You cannot judge yourself by the so-called social competition that you’ve made up in your mind. Life is a race that you run completely alone.”
- “We’re either getting better or we’re getting worse.”
- “Never let people who choose the path of least resistance steer you away from your chosen path of most resistance.”
- “We all have the ability to come from nothing to something.”
- “It’s so easy to be great nowadays because everyone else is weak.”
- “Life is one big tug of war between mediocrity and trying to find your best self.”
- “No one is coming to help you. No one is coming to save you.”
- “A lot of us don’t know about another world that exists for us because it’s on the other side of suffering.”
- “There is no better way to grow as a person than to do something every day that you hate.”
- “If you want to get better, do the things that no one else wants to do. Do the things that no one is even thinking about doing.”
- “It’s easier to accept the fact that you’re just not good enough. We all have a lot more than we think we have.”
- “No matter who you are, who your parents are or were, where you live, what you do for a living, or how much money you have, you’re probably living at about 40 percent of your true capability.”
- “If you’re not physically and mentally prepared for what life is going to throw at you, then you’re just going to crumble, And then, you’re no good to nobody.”
- “The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself.”
- “You may lose the battle of the morning but don’t lose the war of the day.”
- “Comfort zones: If you live in one too long… that becomes your norm. Get comfortable being uncomfortable.”
- “You gotta start your journey. It may suck, but eventually you will come out the other side on top.”
- “It’s about what we do with opportunities revoked or presented to us that determine how a story ends.”
David Goggins Quotes About Achieving Goals
Let’s keep things rolling with some more David Goggins quotes about having what it takes to achieve your most ambitious goals.
- “Be more than motivated. Be more than driven. Become literally obsessed to the point where people think you’re nuts.”
- “Everybody wants a quick fix. You may get results, but they won’t be permanent. The permanent results come from you having to suffer.”
- “Failure is an option. It’s what you do with the failure that makes you who you are.”
- “When I cross the finish line of a big race, I see that people are ecstatic. But I’m thinking about what I’m going to do tomorrow. It’s as if my journey is everlasting and there is no finish line.”
- “I use all of their negativity as fuel to get me where I want to go.”
- “At the end of the day, hard work may not be enough. You still may fail. But you keep going out there and you go after it.”
- “Self-talk and visualization are the two keys to my success.”
- “The reason it’s important to push hardest when you want to quit the most is because it helps you callous your mind. It’s the same reason why you have to do your best work when you are the least motivated.”
- “You finally become proud of yourself when you have no room to become jealous of others.”
- “It’s funny, humans tend to hatch our most challenging goals and dreams, the ones that demand our greatest effort yet promise absolutely nothing when we are tucked into our comfort zones.”
- “Continue to put obstacles in front of yourself, because that’s where you’ll find the friction that will help you grow even stronger. Before you know it, you will stand alone.”
- “Most people who are criticizing and judging haven’t even tried what you failed at.”
- “Most people who doubt you, doubt you because they can never see themselves doing what you are trying to do.”
- “When you fall down, focus on the solution, not the problem. You might quit or fail 100 times. Keep that clear picture of where you want to be.”
- “Everybody comes to a point in their life when they want to quit. But it’s what you do at that moment that determines who you are.”
- “In every failure a lot of good things will have happened, and we must acknowledge them.”
- “You’re gonna fail, you’re gonna be in your head, and you’re gonna be saying I’m not good enough. It’s about how you overcome that.”
- “Teach yourself that it isn’t OK to take the easy way out. Make sure you are bothered by the things you set out to do but did not complete or make time for in the day.”
- “You are giving up instead of getting hard! Tell the truth about the real reasons for your limitations and you will turn that negativity, which is real, into jet fuel. Those odds stacked against you will become a damn runway!”
- “We live in a world with a lot of insecure, jealous people. Some of them are our best friends. They are blood relatives. Failure terrifies them. So does our success. Because when we transcend what we once thought possible, push our limits, and become more, our light reflects off all the walls they’ve built up around them.”
David Goggins Quotes On Self-Discipline
Goggins has a plethora of discipline quotes to choose from because it’s one of the central principles that guides his life.
What makes people like Goggins successful is that they don’t rely on motivation, they rely on discipline. Successful people separate themselves from the crowd by doing what they have to do whether they feel like it or not.
There’s no internal discussion, there’s just pure action. If you can get to that level of self-discipline, there’s very few things you won’t be able to achieve in life.
On that note, let’s dive into some David Goggins quotes on self-discipline.
- “It’s a lot more than mind over matter. It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day.
- “The vast majority of us are slaves to our mind. Most of us don’t even make the first effort when it comes to mastering their thought process because it’s a never ending chore and impossible to get right every time.”
- “When you look in the mirror, that’s the one person you cannot lie to.”
- “You build calluses on your feet to endure the road. You build calluses on your mind to endure the pain. But there’s only one way to do that — you have to get out there and run.”
- “Motivation is isn’t real. Motivation comes and goes. When you’re driven, whatever is in front of you will get destroyed.”
- “A warrior is someone who says; I’m here again today. I’ll be here again tomorrow and the next day. It’s a person who puts no limits on what’s possible.”
- “Analyze your schedule, kill your empty habits, burn out the waste and see what’s left.”
- “Nobody cares what you did yesterday. What have you done today to better yourself?”
- “Most of us are motivated as hell to do anything to pursue our dreams until those around us remind us of the danger, the downside, our own limitations, and all the people before us that didn’t make it.”
- “Life is one big mind game. The only person you are playing against is yourself.”
- “We are all fighting the same battle. All of us are torn between comfort and performance, between settling for mediocrity or being willing to suffer in order to become our best self, all the time.”
- “You can will yourself to do almost anything you want.”
- “In this life there are countless trails to self-realization, though most demand intense discipline, so very few take them.”
- “We live a life defined by the limits we imagine and desire for ourselves because it’s comfortable as hell in that box.”
- “If you want to be one of the few to defy those trends in our ever-softening society, you will have to be willing to go to war with yourself and create a whole new identity, which requires an open mind.”
David Goggins Quotes On Mental Toughness
As you can see from this list so far, Goggins has plenty of hard hitting quotes that you can use as motivational jet fuel.
Let’s keep things rolling with some more David Goggins quotes on mental toughness.
- “I had to use all this negative stuff that was making me weak and horrible as a person and say hold up…this might be exactly what I need. The darkness is exactly what I need.”
- “With running, I’m not training for a race, I’m training for life.”
- “The only way that you’re going to get to the other side of this journey is by suffering. You have to suffer in order to grow. Some people get it, some people don’t.”
- “The mind is the most powerful thing in the world. The mind has capabilities that are unknown, and being able to tap into that is on the other side of suffering.”
- “When you think you’re done, you’re only at 40% of your body’s capability.”
- “The human body can withstand a hell of a lot more than most of us think possible, and that all begins and ends in the mind.”
- “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.”
- “Pain unlocks a secret doorway in the mind, one that leads to both peak performance and beautiful silence.”
- “Don’t let your body or mind do exactly what it wants to do. Take control.”
- “Having lived the life I’ve lived, and seeing the other side, not being afraid to attack what was in front of me has made me happy.”
- “When you’re in hell, you forget how great you really are because you’re suffering and you forget the great things you’ve done.”
- “They say there’s always light at the end of the tunnel, but not once your eyes adjust to the darkness.”
- “Only you can master your mind, which is what it takes to live a bold life filled with accomplishments most people consider beyond their capability.”
- “But what put distance between me and almost everybody else in that platoon is that I didn’t let my desire for comfort rule me.”
David Goggins Quotes On Accountability
To wrap up this list, here’s some David Goggins quotes on accountability and taking control of your life. Feel free to also check out these Alex Hormozi quotes for further inspiration.
- “If you’re not real and raw and real with who you are, you’re never going to change.”
- “When you make excuses, you’re running from the truth.”
- “We all want to take this four lane highway. But we always step over the shovel. All I did was pick up that shovel and make my own path.”
- “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”
- “If you don’t challenge yourself, you don’t know yourself.”
- “It’s possible to transcend anything that doesn’t kill you.”
- “Denial is the ultimate comfort zone.”
- “Living a life avoiding failure does only one thing for you; it never gives you the opportunity to see what you are truly capable of.”
- “The more things you can do to get outside of that zone that makes you feel good, the stronger your mind is going to get… It’s not fun, but now my mind is used to it.”
- “Believe it or not, most people prefer delusion. They blame others or bad luck or chaotic circumstances.”
- “The only reason why I became successful was because I went towards the truth. As painful and as brutal as it is, it changed me. It allowed me to become the person who I am today.”
- “People take classes on self-help, mental toughness, breathing control — the only way to get tougher is to put yourself in hellacious situations.”
- “We have the ability to go into such a space, if you’re willing to suffer, and I mean really suffer, your brain and body once connected together, can do anything.”
- “As humans, we’re reading books everyday to try to figure out how to be someone else. What we don’t do is go inside, turn ourselves inside out, and read our own story. You have to look inside to find out what you really want.”
- “Everyone fails sometimes and life isn’t supposed to be fair, much less bend to your every whim.”
- “Tell yourself the truth! That you’ve wasted enough time, and that you have other dreams that will take courage to realize.”
- “The only way we can change is to be real with ourselves.”
What Can We Learn From David Goggins?
There’s a lot of inspiration to be found in these David Goggins quotes. But as Goggins himself preaches, reading quotes means very little in the context of improving your life.
You need to get out there and apply what you learn because you find out who you really are in the midst of taking action and embracing discomfort.
Here are a couple key takeaways that you can apply to your own life based on these quotes from David goggins:
Talk To Yourself
It’s in our nature to give into instant gratification. Given the choice between the pull of the familiar vs. the uncertainty of the unknown, our brain will always choose the familiar.
This is what gives rise to almost all of our bad habits. It’s why we continually repeat behaviors that don’t serve our long-term goals and avoid positive behaviors that do.
In these moments of internal friction, channel your inner David Goggins and practice some positive self-talk. It’s going to feel a little weird at first, but you’ll be surprised at how much of a difference it makes.
Self-talk works best when you don’t ignore reality. If you’re about to hit the gym, don’t lie to yourself by saying something like, “I’m looking forward to an amazing workout!”
Keep your self-talk very Goggins-like by saying something like this:
”I’m not motivated to go work out right now. It’s the last thing I wanna go do. But I know that the suffering I’m about to go through will make me stronger so I’m going to suck it up and take action.”
You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to talk yourself into hitting the gym, waking up early, or avoiding bad habits when you bring your rational mind into the conversation.
Do Something That Sucks Every Day
One of the things that Goggins talks a lot about is embracing the suck (the things in life that you hate doing). He credits a lot of his success to a daily practice of facing the things that he doesn’t want to face.
I think that this is a practice that anyone can get value from. Voluntary exposing yourself to discomfort helps you develop a better relationship with fear, stress, and anxiety — emotions that most people spend their entire lives running from.
So if you really want to put these David Goggins quotes into action, set yourself a 30 day challenge where you do one thing that sucks every single day.
Get up at 5 a.m one morning. Go on a run. Complete a task that you’ve been putting off for weeks. Put yourself in a weird social environment. Attend an improv class.
Any behavior will work for this challenge as long as it forces you out of your comfort zone!
Final Thoughts
David Goggins has earned the nickname “the toughest man on the planet” for a reason. He’s a true warrior who has cultivated a bulletproof mindset that we should all attempt to mimic.
Even though you may not want to join the Navy seals or be a long-distance runner, you can learn from his outlook on life to apply it to any of your pursuits.
So I hope that you enjoyed this list of David Goggins quotes, and to wrap things up here’s a Goggins-like challenge for those of you who’ve made it this far.
The Goggins Challenge — Do something right now that absolutely sucks.
Get off the couch right now and do something that you want no-part of. It can be something that’s physically taxing or mentally taxing, just find something you don’t want to do and get it done!
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