53 pages • 1 hour read
David GogginsNever Finished: Unshackle Your Mind and Win the War Within
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Evolution 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Goggins differentiates Never Finished from self-help books that offer generic, feel-good roadmaps to personal improvement, the benefits of which are often insufficient and transient. He instead advocates the cultivation of deep-seated belief. Belief is achieved by facing personal challenges and failures until proven resilience destroys all doubt.
Goggins describes a 1950s experiment in which a scientist placed rats in glass containers of water and found they only briefly paddled or explored, drowning in less than 15 minutes. Next, the scientist dropped rats into water but then removed them and allowed them to rest until their pulses and breathing rates calmed. When returned to the pool, this group swam for an average of 60 hours. The experiment’s common interpretation is that it shows the power of hope; the second group of rats were once rescued, so they kept swimming in the hope that they would be again. Goggins, however, believes that while hope might have initially caused the rats to try harder, the experience of swimming longer infused confidence and resilience that kept them going. That is, they had belief.
Goggins states that great accomplishments do not require great starting potential. Goggins, for example, was born with health problems, endured a traumatic childhood, and struggled in school. It was not freedom from obstacles but rather the experience of overcoming them that gave him the strength to excel. He relates resilience to hard rock for a mountaineer’s tether.
Goggins will present his own method of self-transformation and warns that the process can be demanding: “It’s about constant effort, learning, and adaptation, which demands unwavering discipline and belief” (16). He describes the book’s hard truths and tough exercises as a mental boot camp. Assignments, termed “Evolutions,” appear after narrative chapters to train the reader in Goggins’s ideology. He calls Never Finished “a what-the-fuck-are-you-doing-with-your-life book” calling for hard work (17).
Chapter 1 Summary: “Maximize Minimal Potential”
Goggins is at the 2018 Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) annual convention, minutes from receiving the Americanism Award honoring his patriotism and service. However, he feels more confused than proud. He struggles to understand how someone with his background could make it onto the VFW award roster alongside heroes like John McCain. He recalls his abusive father in New York, his and his mother’s escape to Indiana, and the racism of his classmates. He catalogs his own missteps, such as barely graduating high school and struggling on his Air Force entrance exam. He remembers dropping out of the training program for his dream job as a Pararescueman when the water exercises got difficult—and becoming a 300-pound exterminator after leaving the Air Force. He tries to remember what sparked his transformation into a VFW honoree.
When he looks at his mother, Jackie, during his acceptance speech, he recalls the moment that turned his life around: the last time he saw his father, Trunnis. It occurred when he was 24 years old, depressed, and overcome by emotional numbness, which was a protective mechanism that he could trace back to his childhood beatings. He drove to Buffalo to see Trunnis for the first time in 12 years in search of answers: “[W]hen you’re living in hell, the only way to find your way out is to confront the Devil himself” (24).
Revisiting his father’s nightclub and skating rink brought back painful memories of Trunnis betraying, abusing, and demoralizing Jackie. However, Trunnis also disrespected his new wife, showing Goggins that his father was an insecure, empty man who used dominance to elevate himself. Trunnis looked weak and small, not like the demon Goggins remembered and—he now realized—had been hoping to find in Buffalo to establish an excuse for personal failures. Instead, Goggins admitted that he needed to take responsibility for his own future. Goggins felt a powerful force building inside him as he accepted his past, embraced adversity, and chose resilience.
Standing before the VFW, Goggins realizes that after his trip to Buffalo, he became a “warrior”: someone who is constantly improving and never complacent. He also recognizes the renewed importance of that mindset, as he has left the discipline of the military and must rely on his own determination to keep pushing forward.
Evolution 1 Summary
Goggins discusses distracting injuries, which can monopolize a medic’s attention and mask more threatening conditions. He gives the example of a gruesomely broken limb that overshadows—but does not outweigh—a blocked airway. He then says the abuse and racism of his youth once distracted him from the problems he could control. His past experiences had not killed him, but ruminating on them prevented him from truly living. Goggins stresses the urgent need to cut away past offenses, as no one can know when it will be too late to fulfill a dream. He describes a skydiver too focused on untangling a primary parachute to pull the backup cord in time.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Merry Fucking Christmas”
December 26, 2018, Goggins sees his brother, Trunnis Jr., for the first time in three years. Although they both experienced the same abuse as children, they processed the trauma differently and became estranged. As a child, Trunnis Jr. made excuses for his father, forgave him quickly, and hid when Trunnis beat Jackie. Trunnis Jr. even chose to live with his father in Buffalo after Jackie’s escape to Indiana. Goggins believes Trunnis Jr. protects himself by denying the horror of their childhood.
Goggins is not surprised when his brother says he is taking their mother to revisit Buffalo, which Trunnis Jr. remembers fondly. Jackie does not deny the abuse of her past, but unlike Goggins, she blocks it out instead of processing it. On the trip to New York, she remembers very little of the places she revisits, and Goggins explains that suppressing bad memories can erase entire periods of a person’s life. He also argues that facing a difficult past (as he has done) leads to empowerment. For example, Jackie could have visited Trunnis’s grave flaunting and embracing the successful woman she became.
Christmas means very little to Goggins because of his impoverished and unstable childhood, but he and his romantic partner, Kish, have plans to belatedly celebrate the holiday with her family in Florida. Hours before their flight, Kish announces that Goggins’s recently self-published memoir, Can’t Hurt Me, is on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Several publishing houses rejected his book proposal because of his nontraditional message and approach. Rather than pushing positivity, Can’t Hurt Me focuses on hard times and struggle. When he did land a lucrative book deal, however, Goggins hesitated to turn his life story over to someone else. Processing his past by writing about it was empowering and meaningful, so he riskily chose to self-publish, gambling his savings but ensuring the story would remain authentic.
Still chuckling over the bestseller status, Goggins feels his heart racing. He times his arrhythmic pulse and knows he has atrial fibrillation. He tries numerous techniques to stabilize his heart rate, but nothing works. Kish drives him to the emergency room, where first-line medications fail, and doctors need to shock his heart. Despite two earlier heart surgeries, Goggins is afraid. Successfully launching his book makes him fear that his life’s role—to help other people overcome suffering—is fulfilled. Goggins contemplates the impermanence of life and how quickly problems can arise during moments of ease.
The procedure normalizes his heart rate, but his anxiety is still soaring: “I felt like Samson running around bald in the hamster wheel of my mind” (54). He faces a calendar of upcoming medical tests and worries he will have to scale back his physical training. He self-identifies as a savage, someone who always gets back up after being knocked down, but his future as an athlete is in question. He determines that if he can no longer live the lifestyle that he espouses in Can’t Hurt Me, he will pull out of the public spotlight.
Evolution 2 Summary
Goggins states that he hates wastefulness. He then argues that audio recordings can transform negativity into fuel for self-betterment. Goggins instructs the reader to turn fears, traumas, dread, doubt, and disrespect into personal momentum by documenting dark thoughts in detail and then listening to them. With repetition, a trauma can become “just another story,” because “the poison will be neutralized, and the power will be yours” (60). Similarly, hearing unfiltered doubts and excuses can shift an internal dialogue to motivation and drive. He calls this a “winner’s mentality,” where the energy inside every emotion becomes forward momentum.
Introduction-Evolution 2 Analysis
These early chapters establish the tone of the book, which supports Goggins’s differentiation of Never Finished from self-help works that focus on happiness and positivity. Goggins’s goal is to prepare the reader for hard times by introducing hard truths and calling for hard work. Military terminology reinforces this toughness. For example, the Introduction follows a mock “Warning Order,” a preliminary notice for an impending mission, and chapters precede “Evolutions,” exercises meant to hone skills. Likewise, his use of profanity supports his no-nonsense approach, as when the Introduction concludes with, “Rise up, motherfuckers. Let’s work!” (17). Goggins formats the book as a boot camp, which indicates both serious tasks and big results for the reader.
Similarly, many of Goggins’s analogies and metaphors invoke military, adventurous, or athletic imagery, as when he equates resilience to a solid surface for a mountain climber’s tether. This not only parallels the subject of the book (the life of an ultramarathoner and veteran) but also supports the intensity Goggins establishes through his tone and diction, keeping the reader engaged. These rhetorical devices also lend urgency to Goggins’s instructions, as when he equates hanging on to emotional baggage with waiting to open a parachute. Even when Goggins searches further afield for parallels, he uses his examples in a way that aligns with the book’s tone and Goggins’s positioning of himself as a narrator. For example, Goggins illustrates his idea of resilience through the anecdote of a laboratory’s swimming rats. However, Goggins uses the scientific study in an unusual way, countering the accepted conclusion and offering his own interpretation. This reinforces his claim that he takes an uncommon approach and offers the reader something unique.
Flashbacks and juxtapositions are also important aspects of the work’s style, bolstering the concept that big improvements are possible. Chapter 1 opens with Goggins, a decorated military veteran, receiving the Americanism Award, but during the ceremony he recalls being a traumatized, abused child and an overweight, depressed young adult. The contrasting imagery illustrates the magnitude of Goggins’s personal transformation and supports his argument that everyone can achieve greatness, regardless of their backgrounds or perceived limitations. The VFW award and Buffalo flashback also serve to structure and ground the memoir by providing insight into Goggins’s past and marking the end of his military career. He credits the self-accountability that resulted from the Buffalo trip with getting him to VFW stage. This introduces the theme of Personal Accountability and Fault, which takes on a new significance in civilian life that the following chapters will explore.
Chapter 2’s account of Jackie and Trunnis Jr.’s trip to Buffalo provides a real-life example to support Goggins’s message about the urgency of facing painful thoughts. Goggins’s mother suppresses the past for so long that she loses memories altogether, squandering them as a potential source of empowerment, and Trunnis Jr.’s failure to accept hard truths puts his mother in a painful situation. This contrasts sharply with Goggins’s mastery of his demons during his own return to Buffalo.
Still, Goggins acknowledges that the audio-recording assignment of Evolution 2 can be scary. He uses two techniques to assuage this concern. First, he offers personal accounts of using recordings to overcome fear and fuel self-improvement. He also introduces the Evolution with an anecdote about reusing wrapping paper, eating leftovers, and scraping the last bit of toothpaste from a tube. The idea of avoiding wastefulness is responsible and sets up Evolution 2 as a practical exercise.
Goggins provides another personal testament to his methods when he describes the peace he achieved by processing his past to write his first memoir. Explaining that he self-published to preserve the book’s authenticity also lends credibility to his stories. Furthermore, the unlikely success of Can’t Hurt Me becomes another of Goggins’s many underdog stories, as he took an uncommon approach and was successful. Again, he lends credibility to his claim of thinking differently, offering new advice, and producing results.
Chapter 2 closes as Goggins is struggling with the uncertainty of his heart condition. His decision to withdraw from the spotlight if doctors rule out physical training reflects his refusal to rest on past accomplishments. Goggins revisits this conviction, which expounds on the book’s title, in later chapters.
