I Quit a Book About Not Quitting. Then Liz and I Picked a Misogi.

I'm going to be honest with you.

For a long time, I told people I'd read David Goggins' Can't Hurt Me. I hadn't. I got about halfway and put it down.

I didn't quit on purpose. Nobody really does. Work got busy, another book came along, and one day I realized I hadn't picked it up in a long time. I just stopped. And I had a good excuse ready if anybody asked.

Think about that for a second. I quit a book about not quitting.

So here's how I ended up back in it.

I was trying to get more serious about working out, and I went looking for motivation. Everywhere I looked, people said the same thing: don't read Can't Hurt Me. Listen to it.

So I did. The audiobook is 13 hours and 38 minutes. Journalist Adam Skolnick reads the chapters, and then he and Goggins sit down and talk between them. Goggins tells you what was really going on and gives you stories that never made it into the book. Audible calls it an annotated edition with more than two hours of extra material.

It's more like a podcast than an audiobook. And it hit me a lot harder than the printed book did.

Where the Misogi Comes In

A while back, I heard Jesse Itzler on a podcast. If you don't know him, Jesse's the entrepreneur who had David Goggins move in with him for a month to train him. He wrote a whole book about it, Living with a SEAL.

That's where I learned about the Misogi.

The idea is simple. You pick one thing a year that's so hard you're not sure you can finish it. It's not a resolution or a "someday." It's one big, hard thing with a date on it. Itzler took the word from an old Japanese purification ritual.

Liz and I took that idea and made it ours.

Our Misogi for 2028 is to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain.

We have two other goals set for 2026 and 2027, and I'll tell you about those another time. But the Camino is the big one.

And I think that's why the audiobook landed the way it did. A Misogi is the opposite of how I quit that book. When you quit something quietly, nobody notices, including you. When you and your wife pick a hard thing, say it out loud, and put a year on it, it's a lot harder to just drift away.

I'm 57. Here's the Trap.

At my age, it's really easy to call every limitation "being realistic."

I've earned the right to slow down. I'm not built for that. I don't have time. I'm too old to start now.

I've said all of those. Some of them were even true at the time. I've got a family, a business, bills, and people counting on me. But a lot of the time, if I'm honest, the excuse was just a nicer way of saying, "This got uncomfortable, so I stopped."

That's the thing Goggins made me look at. Not that I should live like him. I'm not trying to become a Navy SEAL or run ultramarathons. The point is that I should quit assuming I already know where my limits are.

We're good at making up limits that sound like facts. Say them long enough, and they turn into who you are. Then you never test them again.

Getting wiser is one thing. Giving up and calling it wisdom is something else.

The House Got Quiet

This matters right now because of what's going on at home.

Liz and I are empty nesters. Our son is grown and building his own family. Our daughter left for college at the United States Coast Guard Academy. For decades, our whole schedule ran around raising those two.

Now the house is quiet.

We're proud of them. This is exactly what we raised them to do. But when your kids leave, they take the rhythm of your life with them. And you have to figure out what's next.

Liz and I don't have the whole plan yet. But we know we don't want the next twenty years to be smaller just because the kids are gone and we're getting older. That's a big part of why the Misogi made sense to us. It gives the two of us something to build toward together.

So What Am I Actually Doing?

Getting ready for the Camino means getting my body ready. So I'm back to walking Bruno, my German Shepherd, with real purpose. I'm thinking about strength training and hiking. I want to become a better swimmer, which is something I was never naturally good at. I want to travel with Liz, write more, and create more.

None of that requires me to be David Goggins. It just requires me to stop arguing myself out of it before I start.

The body is where excuses are easiest to see. You took the walk, or you didn't. You got in the pool, or you didn't. Nobody has to explain it to you.

I'm Not Saying Never Quit

Some things should be dropped. Bad plans. Bad habits. Stuff you signed up for for the wrong reasons. There's no medal for finishing something just because you started it.

The question is whether you're being straight with yourself about why you stopped. Did it stop mattering, or did it just get hard?

I've made plenty of mistakes in my life. I've lost ground and had to rebuild. I know a person can get through things that looked impossible at the time. But getting through hard things before doesn't make you brave about what's next. You still have to choose.

Liz and I chose the Camino.

The second half isn't an epilogue. There's still work to do, still places to go, and still parts of us we haven't met yet.

I'm done calling that unrealistic.Carlos