Mark Manson's Blog, page 7

1,273 People Share Their Best Life Lessons from 2020

We will remember this year for the rest of our lives. We will tell people decades from now, “This is what I did in 2020. This is who I was. This is what changed.”

A couple weeks ago, I reached out to my email list and asked, “What have been your biggest lessons from 2020?”

Over a thousand people replied, some with multiple pages of thoughts and experiences. The replies hailed from dozens of different countries, from men and women as young as 15 and as old as 84, from people who had one of the g...

The Fear of the Unknown

Back in the spring of 2020, we each got a front-row seat to the wonders of the human capacity to cope with rampant uncertainty. Within weeks, people developed wild and unhinged beliefs about the virus, health care workers, their leaders and their countries.

Some rebelled and channeled their angst outward. Crime spiked. Protests raged across the world. Others turned inward. Suicides and depression reportedly skyrocketed. Anxiety ran rampant. People became burnt out and went stir crazy.

Others di...

25 Tips For Learning A Foreign Language

When I arrived in Buenos Aires in the beginning of 2010, I could barely order food in a local restaurant. Two years later, I calmly explained the mechanics of Russian grammar to a Guatemalan friend… in her native Spanish.

Today, I’m conversationally fluent in both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, and low conversational in Russian. I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass and tell you it was easy or that there’s some shortcut or hack. I practiced my ass off. Honestly, I’ve seen the supposed “hac...

Why Some Dreams Should Not Be Pursued

Recently, a friend of mine met a woman while on vacation in another country. They had immediate chemistry and decided to keep in touch after he left. As the months passed by, he became more and more enamored with her, telling me that he had never met a woman like this before. He said he hadnt felt this way since he met his last serious ex. Apparently, the feeling was mutual, as the woman continued to battle through time zones to keep in touch with him. Soon, despite living on different...

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: The Paradox of Our Own Ignorance

The English philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Perhaps whats even more amazing is that he said this long before the advent of the internet.

Today, due to the joys of social media, we are regularly exposed to legions of people who believe they know what the fuck they are talking about when they do not. And, indeed, as Russell pointed out, the more clueless...

5 Boring Ways to Become More Creative

Creativity and crazy. They go together like ginger and beer, aged cheese and fine wine, impressionist painters and lead poisoning. One can hardly think of one without the other.

Almost by definition, creativity is the opposite of boring. If something is creative, it’s because it triggers some degree of surprise or excitement within us—it reconfigures existence in ways we could not have previously imagined.

Creative people are not boring. Creative work is not boring. Therefore, we assume that th...

How to Get Better

Note: This was originally written for my weekly newsletter. You can sign up for it here. 

Welcome to another Mindf*ck Monday, the only weekly newsletter where the ideas are as good as the jokes are bad. Each week, I send you three potentially life-changing ideas to help you be a slightly less awful human being. This week, we’re talking three popular ways to “get better” — 1) therapy, 2) journaling, and 3) meditation—and why I believe they’re all actually kinda the same thing.

Let’s get into it.

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How to Overcome Your Limiting Beliefs

There’s an old allegory about a baby elephant that is tied to a fence post. As the baby elephant tugs and pulls, it fails to break the fence or break the rope. Eventually, it gives up and makes peace with its fate. The baby elephant is stuck.1

But eventually, the elephant grows up and becomes a big, adult elephant with gargantuan legs and a huge tusk and swirly trunk and it could easily walk away from the fence if it wanted to. But believing the fence to be some immovable thing, the adult elep...

The No-Bullshit Way to Find “The One”

So you want to find “the one” eh? You’re sick and tired of all the dating apps and websites and trying to meet people in your kickball league? And how many awkward first dates can you go on to find a “normal” person? And what’s with all the fake personalities and flaky people who seem more interested in themselves and can’t be bothered to make a slight change in their schedule to, you know, go out with you?

If this describes the majority of your romantic life, I want you to open up your mind a ...

5 Common Beliefs that Can Subtly Screw You Over

Here’s the tricky thing with beliefs: we all think ours are correct. When actually, almost everything we believe, at some point in our lives, will eventually be at least partially wrong. Yet, we never think about this. After all, if we didn’t think our ideas were right, we wouldn’t believe in them!

But our beliefs are never completely correct. In fact, psychologically speaking, we’re highly fallible, emotionally-driven, self-contradictory meat robots who are occasionally so dysfunctional it’s k...