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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Manson
Started reading
October 1, 2025
his comfort with himself as a failure.
actually fixating on what you lack.
It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for you.
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.
“The smallest dog barks the loudest.”
Either you are or you are not.
the problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health.
The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
the Feedback Loop from Hell.
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.
Wanting positive experience
is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience.
“the backwards ...
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pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it ...
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“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.”
sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it?
Notice how sometimes when you stop giving a fuck, everything seems to fall into place?
not giving a fuck works in reverse.
The pain you pursue in the gym results in better all-around health and energy.
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.
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what...
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attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it.
And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.
To not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.
in constant motion yet arriving nowhere.
Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
he doesn’t care about pissing some people off to do what he feels is right or important or noble.
You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.
Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
This is something called maturity.
believe that today we’re facing a psychological epidemic,
the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.
this book will turn your pain into a tool, your trauma into power, and your problems into slightly better problems.
This book will not teach you how to gain or achieve, but rather how to lose and let go.
It will teach you to not try.
But we all must suffer nonetheless.
It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.
Pain is what teaches us what to pay attention to when we’re young or careless.
since pain can, at times, be life-or-death important to our well-being.
research has found that our brains don’t register much difference between physical pain and psychological pain.
we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us.
True happiness occurs only
when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
In this sense, almost anything can become addictive, depending on the motivation behind using it.
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.
it’s because you’re supposed to do something.
the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never
