Never Finished summary

If you say you haven’t gone through any negative experience in your life, you’re either lying or you’re the luckiest person in the world.

It’s more likely that you have at least one bad memory, whether that’s flunking high school or growing up in an abusive household. This memory has messed with your mind one way or another, and you’ve never felt completely safe or confident ever since. 

What can you do in one second? You surely can’t eat a whole plate of salmon or write a long email or finish a 100-yard dash. But while one second is undeniably very short, you’ll be surprised to know that it just takes that much time to make all the difference in your life. This is what David Goggins calls the “One-Second Decision.”

When you go through the challenges of life, there will be instances when you’ll start to doubt yourself. Maybe you failed to close one deal, and now you think you can’t run a successful business. You failed to make it to Harvard, so you think you were never really smart in the first place. These instances are crucial – they can make or break you.

Imagine you’ve been hiking for days and haven’t reached the summit yet. You look at your trusty map and realize that you’re just a bend away from your goal – only a couple more steps until you can rest and put up your flag on top of the mountain. You round the bend and heave a sigh of relief. “Finally!” you say.

But as you look around, you notice that you’re not actually at the summit. You have another little hill to go up before reaching the true peak. 

You watch a platoon of soldiers doing their early morning exercises and realize what amazing discipline they have. They follow commands to a tee and are ready to strike before the roosters have a chance to go cock-a-doodle-doo. That’s exactly what discipline does to you.

But you don’t have to join the army to acquire the discipline they have. You can cultivate it on your own, right from the comfort of your home. Discipline is actually nothing more than doing things to the best of your abilities. It’s about having the initiative to start something – and not leaving it half-finished. It means trying to get it right the first time around, even when no one’s watching or checking your work. 

Name everything you achieved the day you were born. Yes, that’s right – what did you accomplish as a day-old infant? If you’re anything like most people, probably not much. After all, nobody is born with a ton of trophies and titles under their belt. Everyone starts right at the lowest rung of the ladder. 

But that doesn’t mean that you should be content with being at the bottom when you know that the life you want is at the top. You need to be willing to go beyond that first step. This is where many people go wrong. They prefer staying right where they are because they’re too afraid of what lies ahead.

When you start a new job, one of the first things you'll learn about are the standards and expectations the company has of its employees. You have to be early for meetings. You have to submit an end-of-month report. You have to be a good representative of the firm wherever you go. 

You can find such standards everywhere – not only at your workplace. They guide every member of the team and ensure that they work in alignment with the organization’s goals. You’re expected to meet these standards religiously, and to keep them in mind in whatever you do. 

How do you define greatness? Is it someone who wins the Nobel Prize? Or gets the MVP ten years in a row? Or leads the Moon missions?

Yes, they’re unquestionably some of the greatest of all time – and with how enormous their achievements are, you’ll start thinking that such a level of excellence is simply out of your league. However, that mentality is precisely what holds you back from reaching greatness.

To transform into the person you want to be, you must first overcome the barriers that you and society have put up. This requires your willingness to go beyond your limit, keep the past from tainting your future, and forge ahead no matter the difficulty and pain. 

Here’s a final piece of advice: be selective about who you surround yourself with. The people you keep around should be the first ones to see your maximum potential. Don’t be with folks who hold you back. They should be pushing you up and walking with you toward your goals instead.