I walked past Can’t Hurt Me in stores for years. David Goggins on the cover, staring at me. I never picked it up. I was done with self-help. Done with theories about how to live. Done with monks on mountaintops and founders who wake up at 5am and need you to know about it.
Then a few months ago I bought it. I still don’t know why. Something about it got me that time.
Here’s what I like about it. Most books in this genre invent someone to teach you the lesson. A composite CEO. A wise old monk. A fable with a moral stapled to the end. Goggins doesn’t do that. It’s his own life, told in detail, and the advice gets maybe a page or two at the end of each chapter. That’s it. You’re not buying a system. You’re reading what actually happened to someone, and the lessons are yours to take or leave.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book works the same way, which is why I liked that one too.
Now, about where I actually land on the Goggins scale. If I ever showed up at a Navy SEALs compound, I’d ring the bell before anyone finished explaining the rules. So I’m not going. I’m also not running the HURT 100. Ever. That’s not the part I took from the book.
The part I took is simpler. Set a goal that sounds slightly insane to you, then go get it.
Mine is writing a book.
My weekend projects were already online, and I posted them on LinkedIn like everyone else. Then they’d disappear into the feed a few hours later. This site started as a place to keep them together, somewhere they’d still exist next month. Later I challenged myself to publish something every week. Books I read. Things I learned. Whatever I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Judgment-Driven Development kept showing up in those posts. Not by plan. It just kept being the thing I circled back to: AI keeps making execution faster and cheaper, and human judgment is the one part of the work that doesn’t get automated. It was always the actual job. Now it’s the part that’s left.
Earlier this year I gave JDD its own section on the site, mostly so the material would stop being scattered across a dozen posts.
And now for my next challenge. I’m writing a practical book on JDD. Why it’s needed, and how to actually run it on a real team. I want it out by the end of this year.
I could have kept that to myself. Deadlines are easy to move when nobody knows about them. So I’m putting it here instead.
Now it’s written down, and I can’t quietly let it slide.