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by
Mark Manson
And his success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. He never tried to be anything other than what he was. The genius in Bukowski’s work was not in overcoming unbelievable odds or developing himself into a shining literary light. It was the opposite.
Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.
You learn about the best ways to make money because you feel you don’t have enough money already.
After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is.
There’s a saying in Texas: “The smallest dog barks the loudest.” A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident. A rich woman doesn’t feel a need to convince anybody that she’s rich.
Everyone and their TV commercial wants you to believe that the key to a good life is a nicer job, or a more rugged car, or a prettier girlfriend, or a hot tub with an inflatable pool for the kids. The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more. You are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time. Give a fuck about a new TV. Give a fuck about having a better vacation than your coworkers. Give a fuck about buying that new lawn ornament. Give a fuck about having the right
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You get anxious about confronting somebody in your life. That anxiety cripples you and you start wondering why you’re so anxious. Now you’re becoming anxious about being anxious. Oh no! Doubly anxious! Now you’re anxious about your anxiety, which is causing more anxiety. Quick, where’s the whiskey? Or let’s say you have an anger problem. You get pissed off at the stupidest, most inane stuff, and you have no idea why. And the fact that you get pissed off so easily starts to piss you off even more. And then, in your petty rage, you realize that being angry all the time makes you a shallow and
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And it’s going to save it by accepting that the world is totally fucked and that’s all right, because it’s always been that way, and always will be.
“I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?” And then, as if sprinkled by magic fuck-giving fairy dust, you stop hating yourself for feeling so bad.
We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.
The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make.
The more you desperately want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you come to see yourself, regardless of your actual physical appearance.
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
Ever notice that sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it? Notice how it’s often the person who is the least invested in the success of something that actually ends up achieving it? Notice how sometimes when you stop giving a fuck, everything seems to fall into place?
Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously, I could keep going, but you get the point. Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given.
We give too many fucks about the rude gas station attendant who gave us our change in nickels. We give too many fucks when a show we liked was canceled on TV. We give too many fucks when our coworkers don’t bother asking us about our awesome weekend.
You’re going to die one day. I know that’s kind of obvious, but I just wanted to remind you in case you’d forgotten. You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.
When most people envision giving no fucks whatsoever, they imagine a kind of serene indifference to everything, a calm that weathers all storms. They imagine and aspire to be a person who is shaken by nothing and caves in to no one. There’s a name for a person who finds no emotion or meaning in anything: a psychopath.
Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
Because here’s a sneaky truth about life. There’s no such thing as not giving a fuck. You must give a fuck about something. It’s part of our biology to always care about something and therefore to always give a fuck.
we don’t mean that Mark Manson doesn’t care about anything; on the contrary, we mean that Mark Manson doesn’t care about adversity in the face of his goals, he doesn’t care about pissing some people off to do what he feels is right or important or noble.
The willingness to stare failure in the face and shove your middle finger back at it. The people who don’t give a fuck about adversity or failure or embarrassing themselves or shitting the bed a few times.
They say, “Fuck it,” not to everything in life, but rather to everything unimportant in life. They reserve their fucks for what truly matters. Friends. Family. Purpose. Burritos.
And because of that, because they reserve their fucks for only the big things that matter, people give a fuck about them in return.
You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others. You just can’t. Because there’s no such t...
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The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.
Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
If you find yourself consistently giving too many fucks about trivial shit that bothers you—your ex-boyfriend’s new Facebook picture, how quickly the batteries die in the TV remote, missing out on yet another two-for-one sale on hand sanitizer—chances are you don’t have much going on in your life to give a legitimate fuck about. And that’s your real problem. Not the hand sanitizer. Not the TV remote.
I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.
I think what most people—especially educated, pampered middle-class white people—consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not havin...
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Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.
This book is not some guide to greatness—it couldn’t be, because greatness is merely an illusion in our minds, a made-up destination that we obligate ourselves to pursue, our own psychological Atlantis.
there is no value in suffering when it’s done without purpose.
that life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention.
that pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them.
Happiness is not a solvable equation.
“Sure, making a lot of money makes you feel good, but it won’t make your kids love you,” or “If you have to ask yourself if you trust your wife, then you probably don’t,” or “What you consider ‘friendship’ is really just your constant attempts to impress people.”
We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.
Seriously, problems don’t end. Disappointment Panda just dropped by. We had margaritas, and he told me all about it: problems never fucking go away, he said—they just improve.
“Life is essentially an endless series of problems, Mark,”
“The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.”
“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”
Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is “solving.” If you’re avoiding your problems or feel like you don’t have any problems, then you’re going to make yourself miserable.
True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
if you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action.
Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks.
