Living with a SEAL

Jesse Itzler · 2015

Thesis

Most people live far inside their real limits, held there by comfort and routine, and a month of deliberately doing hard, unpleasant things every day, under someone who refuses to accept excuses, can show how much more a person is capable of and reset what they consider difficult.

The main ideas

Comfort and routine can put a successful life on autopilot.
Hard, unpleasant tasks done daily build a tolerance for difficulty that carries over into the rest of life.
When you feel completely spent, you have used only a fraction of what you have, about 40 percent.
The mind gives up before the body does.
Doing things that are hard because they are hard, and not only because they lead somewhere, changes how you meet every other challenge.
An outside enforcer can push you past the limits you would set for yourself.

Autopilot

Jesse Itzler had done well by any ordinary measure. A former rapper, he co-founded Marquis Jet, a company selling time on private jets, which was sold to NetJets, and was a partner in Zico coconut water, later sold to Coca-Cola. He was married to Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx.

But he felt he was living on autopilot. At a 100-mile race in San Diego, which he ran as part of a relay team, he noticed a large man running the whole distance alone, finishing despite obvious pain. The man was a Navy SEAL. Afterward, Itzler invited him to live with his family for a month and train him.

The SEAL moved into Itzler's apartment in Manhattan in 2010, alongside Itzler, Sara and their infant son. Itzler kept a diary of each day, and the book, published in 2015, follows it day by day.

Implication: a comfortable life can quietly stop stretching you, so look for people who live by different standards and spend time near them.

If it doesn't suck

The SEAL's mantra, as Itzler records it, was "If it doesn't suck, we don't do it." Training was not designed to be pleasant or efficient. It was designed to be hard.

From the start the SEAL set extreme tasks, including, early on, a session of 100 pull-ups. The days were filled with runs through a New York winter and other ordeals chosen for their difficulty. The SEAL did not explain or negotiate. He told Itzler what to do and expected it done.

Itzler's diary records his disbelief, exhaustion and resentment, and his gradual discovery that he could do what was asked.

The mechanism is that discomfort experienced voluntarily and repeatedly becomes familiar, so that the next challenge seems less daunting.

Implication: choose to do something hard regularly, not because it serves an immediate goal but because it trains you to tolerate difficulty.

The 40 percent rule

The best-known idea from the book is what has become known as the 40 percent rule. The SEAL taught Itzler that when your mind tells you that you are completely exhausted and cannot go on, you are only about 40 percent done. The remaining capacity is there, but the mind stops you long before the body would.

The rule is a heuristic, not a measurement. Its point is that the feeling of being finished is a signal sent early, to protect you, and that it can be questioned.

The mechanism is that the brain signals exhaustion well before the body reaches its true limits, and most people obey the signal without testing it.

Implication: when you feel you have nothing left, treat the feeling as information rather than fact, and see whether you can do a little more.

Appreciation for difficulty

What Itzler took from the month, he said afterward, was an appreciation for difficulty. The SEAL drew more satisfaction from a challenge the harder it was, and Itzler came to see that mindset as the real lesson, more than any fitness gains.

Itzler, who had prided himself on his busy, productive life, also noticed how differently the SEAL used his time, with a discipline that left little room for the distractions of an ordinary day.

He has since built much of his public life around the idea, organizing endurance events and promoting the habit of doing one hard thing regularly.

The mechanism is that people who seek out difficulty rather than avoiding it stop treating obstacles as reasons to stop.

Implication: change your relationship to difficulty. Seek it out on purpose, and the hard things you cannot avoid will weigh less.

The SEAL

In the book, the SEAL is never named. He was later identified as David Goggins, who served in the Air Force before completing SEAL training, became an ultramarathon runner, and later wrote his own memoir, Can't Hurt Me.

Itzler presents him as a figure of almost mythic toughness: intense, uncompromising, often baffling to a man used to comfort, and occasionally funny in his total refusal to bend. Much of the book's humor comes from the clash between the SEAL's discipline and Itzler's soft, privileged life.

The mechanism is that a person who has pushed through extreme hardship can serve as living proof that limits are further away than they seem.

Implication: learn from people who have tested their limits, but recognize that their path, including its injuries, may not be one to copy whole.

Limits

It is one person's diary. The book is an entertaining account of a single month, not a training program, and offers no evidence about whether its methods work for others.
Its central rule is a motivational line. The 40 percent figure is a way of speaking, not a measured fact about human capacity, and pushing past pain can cause injury.
Its setup is unusual. Hiring a live-in Navy SEAL for a month depends on wealth and free time that few readers have, and reviewers found the book light, profane and self-regarding.

The Wim Hof Method — another program built on cold, breath and deliberate discomfort.
The Art of Learning — performance under pressure and the mental side of competition.
Mastery — the long apprenticeship that turns discipline into skill.