Book Review: Never Finished by David Goggins

Let’s start out with a couple of seemingly unconnected stories and then jump into the review:

· I once worked under a CEO who had more of an impact on someone in middle management than any other CEO I’ve ever worked for – he had great ideas for how to do things, what things to consider important, and how to keep the energy positive for clients. He made a great impact on all of us at my company. At one point, shortly before he left to start his own company, he had an Ask Me Anything session at a town hall meeting. Most of what he said I’ve forgotten about, but there are two questions I definitely remember. The first was what has been the secret to his success: his answer was to bottle up all the spite from people he felt had slighted him over the years and use that as fuel. The second was what keeps him motivated: his answer was to think about all the people who never thought he’d amount to anything and make sure he could rub it in their faces at how successful he is. I came out of that meeting thinking “I…never want to be that guy”.

· As a formerly dedicated obstacle course racer/mud runner, I was and still am on several Facebook groups with likeminded racers. I remember a couple of years ago, after a Spartan weekend here in Atlanta, someone had uploaded a very innocuous post about how sore they were from the past weekend’s events and how hard it was to even get out of bed. Lots of us Liked the post and added our own misery to the comments. Then someone left a comment saying that if you were sore after running a Spartan race you were clearly not at an optimal fitness level, and you either needed to dial up your exercise level or work on bettering your nutrition. The air let out of the balloon, and the post faded away.

David Goggins (who I keep wanted to call Walton Goggins. Who is an actor who could clearly never be a Navy SEAL. Although wait – he DID play a Navy SEAL in that show “SEAL Team Six”! That role was horribly miscast. Okay, I’ll stop now.) says emphatically at the start of his latest book Never Finished that this is not a self-help book. He claims, after an extended intro, that instead it is a key to unlocking total bad-assery. I feel like I agree with him about it not being a self-help book, but for different reasons.

First things first: Take out the life lessons, and this is a pretty amazing story about an extraordinary person. Goggins’s previous book Can’t Hurt Me detailed his life from being an abused child with severe health problems to failing out of Air Force Pararescue school (due to fear of swimming) to losing 100 pounds in a matter of months to become a Navy SEAL (where there is…a lot of swimming), to having a distinguished military career that also featured stints in the Army Rangers and Delta Force, to becoming a famous ultra-runner and world record holder for total pull-ups. Along the way he shared several life tips that got him where he is today (or at least where he was around 2015) like how to do an effective After Action Report (which I’ve used at times thanks to that book). I haven’t looked back at my review of that book, but I’m fairly certain it was pretty positive for a self-help book.

This book describes what happened from the publication of Can’t Hurt Me all the way to the middle of last year, and the journey is extraordinary. It starts with a bout of Afib in an airport in Nashville, encompasses several ultra-endurance races with some very serious injuries, and ends with him at 47 years old passing training to join a team of firejumpers in Canada. Story-wise, this is a gripping book about someone coming to terms with aging while still pushing through to stay at his best.

But it’s in the details and self-help lessons that he loses me. I’ve always said that when you read a self-help/motivation book, one of the things to think about is who the author is and whether or not you’d want to be that person. David Goggins is definitely not the person I would aspire to be.

It turns out, most of his motivation is centered on spite. He shows no respect for competitors in races, often assuming everyone else is just a weekend warrior (one of his least favorite kinds of people) just clogging up the lanes for the elites like him. When he gets to the start line of the Leadville 100, one of the hardest ultramarathons in America, and finds hundreds of people waiting (or, worse, taking selfies) there with him, he’s immediately motivated to find a harder race to run. He is injured during one of his races and needs to walk for a while; after one other competitor recognizes him and tells him he can’t believe he’s passing David Goggins, Goggins pushes himself as fast as he can (and further injures himself) just to make sure he can shoulder past the guy before the finish line.

Are there sensible tips here? Sure, there are a couple. Each story chapter is followed by an “evolution” chapter about something to do on your own (and ends with the hashtags to put up when you talk about it on Social media because, well, modern times). A few things stick out, most notably for me when he mentions needing to be able to do actions without a clear purpose at times (this is a key one for me – I read all the time about needing a “why” in order to do great things – I really don’t have a lot of “why”s and don’t let that stop me from doing what I feel is the right thing to do). But, as I’ve said before, it’s important to ask yourself if you want to become the person giving the advice before throwing self-help hashtags all over Facebook. Well, Goggins’ goal is to be a total badass and the “hardest of the hard” – it has nothing to do with concepts like love and balance. Goggins looks down on people who reward themselves for hard work, or take injuries seriously before they require hospitalization, or look for solace with others. He wants to take all his anger and hatred and use it as fuel for gritty things.

And obviously, this is his right to fuel himself however he wants, and it has definitely worked for him. But again, is this who you want to be? Sure, he’s been successful – but is this the only way? I think you could find self-help/motivation gurus even among Navy SEALS who have a better emphasis on love and balance – I don’t feel like Mark Divine would scoff at eating a piece of birthday cake or giving a fellow competitor a pat on the back. Goggins also acknowledges that most of the lessons he came up with are based on him doing physical activities, but that you could apply those same lessons to schoolwork, your job, parenting, etc. However, I kept thinking that if you’re trying to be a total bad-ass parent, does that mean you need to devote 100% to that? Can’t you leave something for, I don’t know, your job? And if being the hardest of the hard at those two things leaves you out of shape and flabby, shouldn’t you then leave some space for physical activity? Or does that just turn you into one of those dreaded weekend warriors that just get in Goggins’ way at Leadville?

With all that said, as gripping as the actual story is in this book, I feel like the rating is….

Hold that thought.

I finished reading this book this past Saturday. The next day I had to wake up relatively early (for a weekend) to run a half marathon.

My PR for a half marathon within the last year or two is 2:41. I went into this race intending to run with a 2:45 pace group – so I’d be approaching the fastest time I’m likely capable of, despite being two months removed from surgery and a month out from a bout of COVID. But, like David Goggins after his many and oft-times serious surgeries in his book, I didn’t feel like there was any legitimate reason I couldn’t run fast (for me, at least), so that’s what I intended to do.

Thanks to getting home later than expected, plus a 2AM car alarm next door, I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep going into Sunday morning. Not to mention, although it was in March, Sunday was cold (for Atlanta, at least), with a high in the 40s – it was definitely in the 20s for at least the start of my race. With the fatigue and the cold, at the starting line I seriously considered dropping back to the 3 hour pace group. But then I felt ashamed for even thinking about not pushing myself in the race – after all, if I wasn’t trying as hard as I could, what was the point? So I took off with the 2:45 pace group.

Now, again, it was a very cold day (again, for Atlanta). The cold really impacts me (just like David Goggins, who suffers from Raynaud’s disease), so to tackle 13.1 miles at a fast (for me) pace in conditions that frustrate me, I had to completely focus on the road ahead. I kept my eyes firmly on where we were running to and drowned out the people in my running group. In all the time it took to run this race, I had only two conversations, despite the fact that I had run with two of the people in the pace group just a month back. I disregarded the people and concentrated on the race (just like David Goggins does).

One of the ways the cold impacts me is that I find it difficult to breathe in cold, dry air. I go into oxygen deficit earlier than usual, and I’m sure it could sound to other people like I’m hyperventilating. But I’m fine – I stay at that level the rest of the race, and I’m so used to it I don’t even notice it.

As we were going up a small hill on mile 2, my breathing must have been the prompt for the runner next to me to say “You should really lift your legs more – you’ll have more power to get up the hill if you get your knees and butt into it”.

So someone I’ve never seen before decided to give me running advice. In a RACE.

I could have thought about the sweet intent of it, thanked her for thinking of it, and spent the rest of the race shooting the breeze with her.

But instead it made me angry. And I used that anger to power me through the rest of the race. Just like David Goggins.

I ran at the front of the pack as much as possible. At water stops I took a little longer to take off…because I wanted to run past everybody again. I made sure I was never lined up next to that runner again so I wouldn’t have to hear anything else from her. And with less than a half mile to go I took off and ran it in on my own.

I ended up with a 2:43, just two minutes off my modern-day PR. As I see it, anger shaved two minutes off my time.

Now, do I feel good about the fact that I ran a race just like David Goggins would have wanted me to? Not particularly. But it did happen, and it did happen pretty naturally, so I can’t fully discount any advice that he would give.

This doesn’t change my overall perspective on the book – I still think if you’re looking for life advice you need to find someone with more love and balance in their life. But my own experience raises this rating by exactly one hot dog – final score, six out of ten hot dogs.