“David Goggins it”: The No Hack Productivity Trick.
Over the weekend, I watched Andrew Huberman’s interview with David Goggins and was left in awe.
For those of you who haven’t heard of David Goggins, he is a former US Navy Seal who grew up in tough circumstances. Suffering from ADHD and multiple other learning difficulties, David was unable to read or write when he left school, and his weight ballooned to over 300 pounds. (136kg). As David says, he was the poster boy for what a loser in life would look like.
Yet he changed. He got his weight down, taught himself to read and write, and got himself into the Navy and then the Navy Seals.
Today, at 49, David Goggins is everything you do not want to be. He thrives on pain and pushes himself both physically and mentally every day to the point of exhaustion.
Yet, in this interview — and many others I listened to with him — David Goggins speaks a truth most people don’t want to hear. That truth is, no so-called life hack (or time management/productivity hack) will ever work.
The only way you will get the work done is to do the work. No pretty new app or ‘technique’ will do the work for you. It’s on you. If you want to lose weight and get fit, you don’t need fancy new kit or an expensive gym membership. Get down on the floor right now and do twenty push-ups. Then, go and run around the block for twenty minutes. (I’ll wait.) Oh, and put down that cookie. No more of those, I’m afraid.
It’s easy to blame others for your email backlog. And sure, other people sent you the email, but it’s on you to either delete it or respond. If you want to get on top of your email (Teams or Slack messages), hiding your head in the sand and hoping it will go away isn’t going to change a thing. When you remove your head, you’ll have received another fifty messages.
And if you think email apps like Hey or Superhuman will change things, they won’t. Your email still needs to be responded to, and if you’re getting these expensive apps to filter emails you don’t need, you can do that yourself in Outlook, Gmail or Apple Mail without the expense.
The reality is, if you have a backlog of emails and messages and you are reading this, you’ve made the wrong decision about how best to spend your time right now.
Today, David Goggins is a multi-millionaire. He no longer needs to push himself every day. He could retire and give himself an easy life. But there is one very good reason he does not. He believes that the missing piece of life is pushing yourself to your absolute limits to see what you are capable of.
You can see this with wealthy and successful people, particularly those who inherited their wealth or success. No matter how privileged their life is, they feel something is missing. That piece is the discovery of what you are truly capable of.
David Goggins talks about having a daily battle with the negative voices in his head. The ones we all get: “I’m tired, I can’t do this”, “That’s too hard for me”, “I don’t want to get out of bed” etc etc. His solution? He tells those negative voices to “F-off” and then do whatever he is too tired or doesn’t want to do.
When you think about it objectively — without allowing your excuses to surface — you know this is true. There are no hacks to becoming more productive or managing your time better. What works is simple. Do the work, and don’t stop until it’s done.
It’s about beginning the day knowing what needs to be done and doing whatever it takes to get it done. No hack or new app will make that happen. Only you can do that. So go do it. You’ll feel much happier with yourself and soon rid yourself of all those backlogs.
David Goggins is unique but no different from you or me. He’s a living, breathing human being who happened to stumble upon something our ancestors knew. Doing hard work is hard, and that’s precisely how it’s supposed to be. Accept that and go do it. Now!
Thank you for reading my stories! 😊
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