You’ve Probably Been “Taking Souls” Before Goggins Made it a Thing

“Nothing wants to stand in front of anything that is relentless.”

David Goggins running 135 miles through Death Valley, California during the Kiehl’s Badwater Ultra Marathon — U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Brandon Rogers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

An accidental read that shifted my thinking towards better is David Goggin’s book named Can’t Hurt Me. He has a reputation for being the world’s toughest man alive. Only a shallow dive into his story shows you why. Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL who holds some unreal accomplishments to his name. He endured three “hell weeks” in one year, finished an ultra-marathon while running on broken legs, with this the first of many races to come.

Goggins is no trust fund baby. He grew up in an abusive household during the disco era in Buffalo where he involuntarily worked night shifts at his dad’s skating rink. Lack of sleep caught up with him during the day, negatively impacting his school results. As he says, he should’ve been a statistic. In a bug extermination job he held in his twenties, he found the “mother of all cockroaches” in a restaurant so dirty, that he quit his job then and there, and committed to turning it all around.

On my daily pre-lockdown walk, I never left home without an audiobook. Can’t Hurt Me is available on Audible and narrated, with radio-show-like conversation gluing chapters of his memoir together. The man’s climb from bottom-of-the-gutter to most badass…