(NewsNation) — David Goggins has been haunted all his life.
The former Navy SEAL was abused, witnessed death, experienced depression and was overweight. He was bulled in school and had a learning disability.
For the first 24 years of his life, he waited around with hopes that something would change his fortunes.
“I thought that there was this, you know, fallback plan, this mythical fallback plan that we all have, and I realized the harsh reality was that the fallback plan was me,” Goggins said. “Once I realized that, after years of just sitting around waiting for something to magically happen and propel me into the right place, that’s when the work started happening for me.”
Goggins set out to better himself, embarking on a weight loss journey that saw the nearly 300-pound man lose a third of that. He enlisted in the Air Force, where he served for five years before joining the Navy in 2001, graduating from the BUD/S program to become a SEAL.
An ultramarathon runner, Goggins has become one of the most well-known ultra-endurance athletes and accumulated numerous accolades over the past two decades. He has earned the moniker “toughest man alive” and is known as an inspiration for those who want to improve their mental and physical health.
In his first television interview in nearly four years, Goggins joined NewsNation’s “CUOMO” to discuss his life, achievements and the mentality that drives him to be better every day. It started at that age of 24, when he realized he needed to find inner strength and will — a belief in himself.
“It’s great for your mom and dad to say ‘believe in yourself,’ and after a while you start to actually do that, but in those hard times, it doesn’t work real well. So, I started building beliefs by doing these extreme hard, hard things,” Goggins said. “It’s not just like running or swimming or whatever it may be. For me, starting off, it was just studying. I battled depression when I was real young … and I had to learn to manage these highs and lows, and it was so difficult to do. It’s hard to perform when you have no purpose at all.”
As he began to focus on one thing at a time, Goggins said he was able to work toward the goals he wanted to achieve.
He once ran 100 miles in 19 hours during the 2005 San Diego One Day, a 24-hour ultramarathon. He has competed in numerous events over the years and formerly held the Guinness World Record for completing 4,030 pull-ups in 17 hours.
He is the only member of the armed services to complete SEAL training, Army Ranger School and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training.
Goggins shared his story in his first memoir, “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” which was published in 2018 and details his “nightmare” childhood and how he transformed himself from an overweight, depressed man into a Navy SEAL and athlete.
The health and wellness aficionado is a sought-after public speaker, according to his website, and has traveled the world to share his “philosophy on how to master the mind.”
For Goggins, part of mastering his own mind has meant “getting harder” and transforming an internal voice that sought to make excuses for his failures into one that drove him to be better.
“I wanted to be one of the 1 percenters, not the 99%. I realized I had one life to live, and I have to live it. All these things started happening to me, and then once they started happening, man, everything flipped,” Goggins said. “That internal (drive), it starts to build a voice in you that doesn’t allow you to sleep in, doesn’t allow you to take days off when you know that you’re behind. It just keeps you in check throughout everything you’re doing in life because it’s not going to allow you to fail.”
In telling his story, Goggins has amassed a huge social media presence, with 5.8 million followers on Instagram, 1.5 million on Facebook and another 694,000 on Twitter. He said it’s been humbling to see the number of people he’s reached.
“I wasn’t trying to become some person that changed people’s lives,” Goggins said.
He released a new book last month titled “Never Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within,” which gives readers an inside look at the “philosophy, psychology, and strategies” that enabled Goggins to “learn that what he thought was his limit was only his beginning and that the quest for greatness is unending.”
With him on that quest for greatness is that voice in his head, one that “gets louder and louder it becomes more and more haunting.”
“The more haunting it becomes, the more it doesn’t allow you just to live your life, eat those donuts, not work out, work in these mediocre jobs with mediocre money, live in a mediocre house. It’s saying, ‘You’re better than this’ … and that’s what happened to me,” Goggins said. “I just have never ever turned that voice off. It’s just loud now, and now it’s so loud that I don’t hear any other voice but, ‘We have to do, we have to be better, we have more in us.'”