Can't Hurt Me

The least true thing I have ever said to a girl in my entire life is that I was thinking about joining the military, and I think it’s happened probably 15 times since I was born. Well maybe that or that I was thinking about becoming a vegan, it’s neck and neck. But look, in my defense I’ve thought about a lot of shit so I don’t know that it was technically a lie so much as an incredibly brief aspiration. Like an electron-lengthed journey from one end of the idea to the other and back again.

I grew up in a military area and I have a ton of friends who have served in various capacities, so starting in late high school I felt like sort of a bitch for not doing it too. There wasn’t a lot of pressure on me to join or anything dramatic like that, I just was very good for awhile at noticing effort-based systems and implicating myself in them as a failure for not trying rather than just being like that’s not for me but thanks everyone. And I was right, the military and I had very little to offer one another and the concept of me being responsible for any procedure-heavy thing that could also create an explosion of some kind is so outrageous it’s not even a good use of the couple of calories it would take to keep thinking about it.

I sincerely cannot remember how I heard about David Goggins, I think it might have been from a podcast or a friend recommendation, but when I did I was a year deep into covid and the only stress outlets I was interested in were eating delivery food and drinking. I knew I was stuck in a cycle that I was not enjoying whatsoever and I was extremely aware that I was living at maybe 10% of my personal capacity, but I was having trouble sticking with a real way out. The little bit I had heard about Goggins was that he was the most insane motherfucker alive, and when I dug into his story it sounded like some real life Achilles shit. As a quick example, he lost 100 pounds in 3 months so that he could make weight for getting into BUD/S, and he finally passed the program after having to do it 3 separate times. For context, that would be like if Dante got to the bottom of Hell where the Devil was chomping some of the Worst Homies Ever in his mouth and then circled back to the entrance twice.

That’s only the very tip of the iceberg in terms of his story, but I can very confidently say that me turning my life around started with reading his book Can’t Hurt Me. The point of it isn’t that everyone should run ultra-marathons or do a trillion pullups, so you can learn that ahead of time (I didn’t and it took me awhile). The point is that you don’t actually know where your ceiling is, and you’re the one holding yourself back from finding out where it is. That was exactly what I needed to stop drinking and start untangling the other unhealthy habits in my life, and to start developing a brutal commitment to myself to kick ass. Every 6 months since I got this book have been better than the last, and I cannot recommend it enough. If this book is for you then it will absolutely ruin your life, but the one waiting on the other side of some hard decisions is the one you’re supposed to be living anyway so there’s no point waiting around for something else to make that obvious to you. If you need a pro-tip, get the audio version and listen on your morning walk.