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by
Mark Manson
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November 23 - November 27, 2020
conventional life advice—all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time—is 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.
no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is.
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.
Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. 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.
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.
Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.
The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.
To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
I think what most people—especially educated, pampered middle-class white people—consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.
Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.
greatness is merely an illusion in our minds, a made-up destination that we obligate ourselves to pursue, our own psychological Atlantis.
life itself is a form of suffering.
the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear.
We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.
Pain, in all of its forms, is our body’s most effective means of spurring action.
this is what’s so dangerous about a society that coddles itself more and more from the inevitable discomforts of life: we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us.
Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded.
Happiness comes from solving problems.
The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.
True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.
Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences.
happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems. Joy doesn’t just sprout out of the ground like daisies and rainbows. Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.
People want to start their own business. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, the insane hours devoted to something that may earn absolutely nothing.
Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.
The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.
Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems. The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.
People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better.
“The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.”
If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”
in my experience, the more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true.
Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else.
If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect. If you get the other stuff right (the other values and metrics), then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product.
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.
As a rule, people who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being reflected back at them.)
When we have poor values—that is, poor standards we set for ourselves and others—we are essentially giving fucks about the things that don’t matter,
when we choose better values, we are able to divert our fucks to something better—toward things that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate happiness, pleasure, and success as side effects.
what “self-improvement” is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And wh...
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Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
If you’re miserable in your current situation, chances are it’s because you feel like some part of it is outside your control—that there’s a problem you have no ability to solve, a problem that was somehow thrust upon you without your choosing.
When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our w...
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There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances.
We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
“With great responsibility comes great power.”
