HOW GOGGIN'S COOKIE JAR TRICK BOOSTS DISCIPLINE

The one part of Navy SEALs training they don’t tell you about? The cookies.

You Don’t Know Him Son

You’re kind of a badass. Maybe not now, although scrolling this newsletter is at one of the lower levels of badassery, but you’ve done some things in your life (I hope). 

But, not to undermine that happiness, but David Goggins…well he’s done a lot too. Navy SEALs training. Hell week 3 separate times. Running hundreds of miles without stopping. 

There’s a lot more hardships than that, but it’s something that makes people so confused. How in the hell could anyone endure that? 

The pain of going in cold water, carrying boats and logs, bleeding, sweating, covered in sand, while lacking sleep and food, and then do it two more times? 

How does anyone run that far without dying? 200 miles? 

Well, we’ll tell you how.

The Cookie Jar

The strategy is super simple. Eat a ton of cookies. Pick your favorite. Get ‘em from the store, or freshly bake them. 

Ha, just kidding. That was slightly evil, but let’s be real, we both knew David Goggin’s secret to discipline isn’t eating cookies. 

The Cookie Jar is a concept David made during his first ultra run in San Diego. It was hot as hell, and he had to run 100 miles. On one of his first runs, to repeat myself. 

He thought back to when he was a kid. When he was really young, his mother fled the house with David and his brother because of the abuse his father was bringing upon the family.

David’s mom being a single mother, it was tricky paying all the bills. But they had a cookie jar, which brought David a lot of happiness. 

They didn’t always have the luxury of plenty of meals, but the cookie jar was full of a variety of different choices, and they were all delicious. 

When digging in there, you never know what cookie you’re gonna get. And that is how we’re about to become as disciplined as David Goggins (maybe not that disciplined, but who knows). 

Choose Your Cookies

Now, what are the cookies? The cookies are the moments in your life where you overcame some stuff. And don’t pretend you don’t have any. 

Don’t sell yourself short. There are things you have accomplished when you didn’t think you could. Could be a run. A workout. Skydiving. A competition. Etc.

Assemble all of them, because you need all of them. 

The use case for these: pull them out when you’re struggling. When you need them most. 

When David was on that 100-mile run in the heat, he used his Cookie Jar. He reminded himself he had gone through Hell Week 3 times, lost over 100 pounds in a few months, became a SEAL, left his job, and defied all the odds. 

Having that is a potent fuel. One that keeps you running, whether it be literally or metaphorically. 

Here’s the one rule though.

Gotta Be Real

Your mind isn’t gonna believe some made up stuff. Or maybe it will. If you can work 10x harder by telling yourself a lie, I guess go right ahead.

But you have to pull the real moments. The ones where things sucked, and then you kept going anyway. 

Moments where you look back and even now you wonder, “How the hell did I pull that off?” 

This gives you what we call a “second wind.” It’s not what happens when you fart twice, which is a misconception. 

There will be a moment where you don’t want to move anymore. It’s important for moments like that, you have a cookie jar, and cookies in it to choose from. 

Reach in there, pick one out, and use it as fuel to go further. And the beauty of the cookie jar is, it compounds. 

If you’re doing something hard, then use the cookie jar to overcome it, you just added another cookie. So it becomes a positive feedback loop. 

So we task you with this. 

Define your cookies. What are the moments that you’re really proud of? That made you who you are? You didn’t want to do something and you still did it. 

Keep them in a nice glass jar in the mind, and be ready to use them to take you further.

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