I recently re-watched the first two Terminator films. In case you haven’t seen them, the premise is that powerful machine assassins have been sent back in time from a future AI (Skynet) to assassinate the future leader of the human resistance (the second movie) or his mother (the first movie). Besides being generally enjoyable as action movies, they include a lot of interesting themes about inevitability, technology, and humanity. These have become especially salient given recent developments in AI.
The most striking thing about the terminators, besides being near-unkillable robots wearing human disguises, is their monomaniacal focus on their assigned tasks. From the second they arrive in the past, they waste no time acquiring clothes1 and weapons before tracking down their targets. In the first movie, a human is sent back as well to protect the mother of the resistance leader, and he shows a great deal of focus as well (aside from an amorous encounter that results in the conception of the resistance leader in the first place). But the machines embody a whole other level of determination which is quite literally inhuman.
One of the closest real-life examples I could think of that approaches this level of willpower and dedication is a man named David Goggins. Full disclosure, everything I know is from reading his Wikipedia page and my friend sending me Strava memes with one of his monologues in the background. Goggins does super hard physical challenges like ultra marathons, feats of strength, and even going through grueling training to join the most elite branches of the military. But why does he do all of this? Seemingly, it is just to test the limits of his endurance and prove his willpower to himself (and his fans). I think part of the reason he is so famous is because such drive is so rarely found among humans.
At first it may seem like he is abnormal in being able to do such intense activities. However, a major part of his rhetoric and what makes his message appealing is that anyone could potentially do what he has done if they just enter the right mindset. The way he tells it, and it seems believable, it would have been very easy for him to give up given everything he has gone through on top of the difficulty of the challenges themselves. You could argue that going through adversity elsewhere has made him better able to weather these additional challenges, but that argument could just as easily work the other way. Plenty of people endure equally adverse circumstances and end up nowhere near Goggins, not because they’re weaker but because adversity is an unreliable forge: it can temper you or it can break you, and the variable that determines which usually isn’t more adversity.
If his level of motivation were as portable as his messaging suggests, the world would look very different. We’d have vastly more ultra-marathoners, far fewer abandoned New Year’s resolutions, and probably a lot of strained relationships from people too busy training to talk to anyone. The fact that most of us watch the monologue and then go back to scrolling is itself the evidence that whatever Goggins has isn’t reducible to mindset alone. Yoda’s “Do or do not. There is no try” lands as a koan precisely because, in practice, almost everyone tries.
Given (for the sake of argument) that we ourselves could become Terminator-like in our levels of willpower, the real question is: should we? To me it comes down to a question of what your goal is. I appreciate the value of Goggins and similar figures in that they demonstrate the limits of what you can achieve given sufficient motivation. But putting aside every other concern to focus entirely on achieving something means that this goal must really be worthwhile. If such a goal arises for you I think it would be worthwhile, given that there is little risk of a backfire or misfire. Until you find one, though, it is probably not.
Footnotes
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they have to travel back naked for some reason. ↩