“Can’t hurt me” follows on -last chapters in a nutshell

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 As I promised last ime, please find herein the summary of the last chapters of David Goggins’ book, “Can’t Hurt Me - Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds” that can help you to empower your life, take control, dominate your fear, pains and suffering to grow, to be successful… it is not usual chicken soup for the weak but can help anybody to stand up and fight for his or her life.

Mission 6: Build Your “Cookie Jar” of Accomplishments & Use It For Motivation

Goggins wrote: In the most painful time of my life, I saw the most beauty.

·        The “cookie jar” is his own concept, a place where you can put all of your victories. But also you can add every single time when you show mental toughness or callous, as well as resilience.

·        We all need some small accomplishments referred to as sparks, just like the rocket of an engine needs to fire. Sparks or accomplishments are needed in our lives to fuel the big sparks or accomplishments. A small fire is needed to start and fuel the bracero or bonfire. Like a pyromaniac, who uses a small spark to build sufficient “heat” to destroy and burn a whole wooded area.

·        We can all accomplish much more that what we possibly think we are capable. You can washstand and can accomplish so much more because everything starts in your mine and ends in your mind. Go over your comfort zones to reach higher zones to thrive a little bit. Some discomfort helps you to be stronger as your body and mental system gets used to it and adapt.

·        The cookie jar is here to help you to spark motivation when needed not to make yourself feel good. Opening the cookie jar helps you reminding the badass you are and keeping remind yourself of all the good and great things or deeds you have accomplished so far. The cookie jar is here to provide you with an engine to spark the energy you need whenever you need it. It is just like putting your money in the bank in case you need it. Everyday time you check your accounts, you know you can count on it!

·        One of the lessons here is to fetch for and see the most beautiful in the most painful times of your own life. Goggins recommend filling in your journal by taking inventory of your Cookie jar. You write down your achievements, but you must also pend down all the obstacles you’ve run though in your life, but you have overcome. Those can include overcoming burn-out or depression, quitting smoking or drug addiction. You must also add the smaller tasks you failed earlier in your life, but you tried to go over that failure a second, third or fourth tie to overcome them. And you finally succeeded. The Cookie Jar can help your remind how you felt when you overcome struggles, and finally were the winner. The key takeaways here it goes to work, take action and use bad and good experiences to get stronger, more resilient and more motivated.

·        Whatever the activities you are committed to, do feel free to set ambitious goals before every single step in your life and use those past victories skyrocket you to your new personal best… it’s up to you and your way of mind!

Mission 7: The Most Powerful WEAPON Is to Remove the Governor From Your Brain With Constant Incremental Growth

• What am I capable of? Is your questioning mantra. Goggins introduces here his 40% rule. It means that when you are hitting your limits you are only at 40% or so.
• If you never learn to stay in the pain (and only fetch for pleasure) and push your capabilities/potential. For Goggins, there are still 60% to travel, and 40% is not your absolute limit, but you can go far beyond. Give more and go the extra 60% by increasing from 10% to 60% in the end. You need to unlock your mind’s limitations to newest and highest levels of achievements, performance and excellence, whatever, in your life (personal and professional) or in sport. The rewards will be more significant and will last longer than the mere acquisition of material stuffs you do not really need. Defeat material success to gain success over yourself.
• Never tell yourself or teach your kids to settle for less than their possible best.
• Waking and getting up very early and being willing to do things in early morning will make you better in all your life’s circumstances…
• You can accomplish much more, mentally and physically, when you push yourself beyond pain and sufferings. Going beyond your perceived limitations and fears to master your inner self! He says: “The best way to overcome anything in life is to become a master of what you’re afraid of. Become a master of your insecurities.”
• Outstretch your own tolerance to pain because pain is required to grow stronger by callousing your mind and chasing pain as if it was a full-time professional activity. Leisure and fatigue make you a coward or a “pussy”.
• Teach yourself how to remain present in “the present moment” and “open minded” so as to redefine your goals when needed. Never give up, stay in the fight to reap the deserved rewards: a stronger you!
• You must remove your Governor (inner critique…) by using research findings, such as getting ready or making preparation, but using also visualization as an additional tool. Your Governor must help you to achieve your goals not to remind your limitations or unachievable dreams.
• To help you accept that, uses Goggins’ “laws of nature” when he writes “You will be made fun of.”, “You will feel insecure.?, ?You may not be the best all the time.?, ?You may be the only black, white, Asian, Latino, female, male, gay, lesbian or [whatever your identity that you can replace ere] in a given situation.”, or “There will be times when you feel alone.” These are true but you must get over them all. You mind is the strongest and most powerful weapon of all times to use but it seems that you’ve stopped using it. Use it again, regain control over it. Fight with yourself, regain control, build up a stronger or fiercer identity, be more open minded and do access and use all your inner resources. As a serviceman, his own mind was his own battlefield. And he aged wars against himself to become who he wanted to become!
• Goggins recommends getting slowly rid of your Governor from your brain by taking command of your inner dialogue. Find renewed confidence and mental toughness by continuously pushing yourself intellectually and physically so as to keep uplevelling all the other parts of your life. The key takeaway here is that life is a huge mind game or haze and hat you need to play against yourself to control yourself.

Mission 8: Schedule Your Life to Make The Most Out Of Your Life even though Talent Not Required

• Stop looking for the life hack or quick-fix. There is no such thing to be successful…
• Chasing that rare efficiency everybody wants does not help developing a calloused mind or achieving self-mastery. The only road to master the power within, your mind, and remove your governor, is to get addicted to hard work but also deep work. For him, obsession and passion, and why not even talent, can only be useful if you can back them up with the right working ethic and attitude. You need to fuel your passion to keep going…
• Your personal work ethic must be the only factor that should be important in all of the areas of your life, as well as your accomplishments. Everything else is secondary. Again, the 40% Rule applies here whatever hard work is involved, on the workplace on in the gym facility. Overcome that 40%-mediocrity level of most people. Stop being mediocre by climbing some more step on your personnel “ladder”!
• In a 168-hour week, you always have extra time to work extra time without finding excuses for not going to the gym, not spending happy and quality times with your relatives. He recommends scheduling your life as if you were on a 24h/7 mission, every single day of your life.
• You must defeat the morning and capitalize on the dark hours before dawn comes.
• Assess your whole life to avoid wasted time.
• Stop spending time on watching TV or cramming hours on social networks. If you do so, you will be able to add up full days and weeks to your timetable. Saving minutes is like saving some money! Think about it!
• Schedule your life! And keep fueling your passion or obsession…
• Divide your days in different blocks of planned activities.
• Identify and utilize the hours you daily burn so as to get on your way to better productivity.
• Once you’ve mastered the former point, create and develop an optimal planning or schedule. Everything should be locked into place in blocks ranging from fifteen to thirty-minute. But some tasks may be distributed on several blocks to be carried out, even days or weeks or months.
• Only work one thing at a time because multitasking is a myth!
• When a task is over put it aside and go to the next one on your schedule. Use the same methodology, concentration and focus for every single task you must perform.
• All that effort should help you build a maximized working schedule: no wasted time, no lack of sleep, no missed moments with your relatives, time for self-reflection...
• The key takeaway here is that Goggins it exhorts the reader to do one thing and do it well.

Mission 9: Be Uncommon Amongst Uncommon by Sustaining Greatness While Staying In Constant Pursuit

• Since this chapter is dedicated to failures, you’ll learn to turn every negative into a positive and be “uncommon among uncommon”.
• Goggins shows the strength and the drive that come from the “not belonging” mindset. Have your own uncommon standards to live up to whatever the others think or believe (jealousy from family or friends -your successes are a danger to them). Goggins wrote: “Torch the complacency you feel gathering around you, continue to put obstacles in front of yourself because that’s where you will find the friction that will help you grow even stronger… Before you know it, you will stand alone.”
• Don’t let your desire for comfort rule you but get the overachiever’s mindset. He says: “It’s easy to stand out among every day people and be a big fish in small pond. It’s much more difficult when you’re a wolf, surrounded by wolves.”.
• “Take pride in suffering.” Because it is when you take pride in your ability to suffer and endure that you use the greatest techniques of all.
• You can be satisfied with what you have achieved, in business, sports, or life, but not too long so as to keep moving because life is a moving game, non-stopping playground. You’re either getting worse or we’re getting better.
• You must always triple down on your weaknesses to callous your mind, i.e. do your best to become stronger and more agile, mentally and physically speaking. You must become more capable and more reliable. Never get the impression that you have finished developing yourself in all areas. There’s necessarily always some more work and efforts to do.
• Don’t be afraid of being ridiculous or ignorant or mocked at if you do not know something, admit your fears and insecurities to get stronger because this is the only way to widen your knowledge, working abilities, spirit and mind.
• Training hard your mind can help your being relaxed in very unpleasant circumstances or harsh conditions. Play the mind game of endurance since all pains come to an end.
• Because you cannot control all the variables in your life, it is up to you to adopt the right attitude or take the good opportunities to create your happy end to the story? If you don’t, “Life Will F*ck You Up”. Goggins says that life is unfair, and it will “f*ck you up”. And the sooner you accept it, the sooner you can start preparing for it. (Some of you may disagree with Goggins’ attitude towards it). But it is his personal experience…
• You’ve found or reached some level of status, respect, popularity, or success, in your life so far. Goggins reminds us that you must always have to go the extra mile and find more. For instance, if you meet greatness or prosperity, they are not things that will stay with you forever without efforts, pains, hard work and dedication. It can vanish so quickly. Becoming “uncommon amongst the uncommon” requires strength and requires you to fuel and maintain greatness or prosperity for a long period of time. This is not easy because you will have to stay focused on constant pursuit on it and making daily efforts without stopping.
• Becoming really a genuine overachiever does require deep self-awareness, hard work, faith, courage, pain, suffering since Goggins uses bellicosity, and war-like references for everything such as life as “winning the game of war”. 

Mission 10: Failure Empowers You If You Learn to Dominate Your Mindset

• Failure is always a possibility on your way to future success, but never an obstacle if you decide to challenge it again and again.
• You must be surrounded by people who tell you what you do need to hear, not what you so wish and want to hear.
• In your heads, this is where the battleground is, where you lose or won your wars. Be confident in your heart, spirit, mind, and inner dialogue. Be faithful in you! Believe in you!
• From failure you’ll learn how to overcome where you failed by identifying why you failed and the required steps you’ll then need to take not to fail again and again.
• Failure is not evitable for God’s sake, but failure is the greatest teacher of all time! In every failure, a lot of good things can happen, and we must acknowledge them. Indeed, fail to succeed not to despair or give up! And achieving goals or overcoming obstacles doesn’t provide fun.
• Use empowering phrases and words to keep focused locked onto your objectives.
• Everybody fails from time to time, but life has never meant to be fair and easy, even less force to obey your wills.
• Never focus on what you do think you deserve, but preferably fight for what you are willing to win.
• Life is a mind game. You are the “game” in the wood. The head game isn’t “game over” until you’re dead and buried.
• Use your journal, log in your failures with the so-called After-Action-Review (AAR in the military slang)? Pen down all the good things, i.e. everything that went ok from your own failures. Do not hesitate to give plenty of details. In failures, many good things may happen.
• Then draft a list of all the things you can fix or all actions you can take to remedy a failure. Do not be soft or kind or generous on yourself. Be harsh and critical, write all your failures out. Study and review them all in details. Be cynically and brutally true to yourself. Nobody will do it for you! Then check your timetable/calendar and schedule another trial or attempt as early as possible so as not to lose the dynamic of life and of learning from it to reap the benefits. Learning from errors and failures is a way to row up!
• Always control your mindset.
• Always dominate your thinking, your inner dialogue, and your self-esteem.
• And win the game over your mind and inner critique within.

Mission 11: What If?

• As Goggins puts it, “I see pain as a necessity to achieve something bigger, but at times it felt that it was pain for pain’s sake”. For him, pain can unlock an unknown doorway or a secret hatch into your mind. The kind of entrance that can lead you to peak performance, success…
• You must go over the painful point or stage that oversaturates your mind, the breakdown point. Overcoming your limits and bypassing your inner boundaries will enable you to connect to your true self, to the depth of your soul, to the universe, to your true silent master.
• Deprogram your mind to stop fetching only for pleasure and comfort zones. Get out from that disillusion of joy over pain. Grow higher limits to overcome them and keep growing in the meantime. Switch your mindset and go through pain for as many as benefits as possible.
• Your inner voice, the critique within leads the most important conversations that you have with yourself. Do your best to dominate its inner conversations or dialogue with your conscious mind because they accompany you all days long, when you wake up with that voice, when you walk shop with it, when you go to sleep with it, and eventually when you decide or not act on them if not too lazy, whether the voice utters good or bad words. Neutralize everything that is negative from your mind…